But perhaps we should seek the Lightstone in order quicken our gifts.'
He went on to tell us that our work with the gelstei had great merit, as did our lives, even if we failed in our quest.
'Alphanderry said it best,' he reminded us. 'Do you remember his words?'
We are the songs that sing the world into life, I thought. And then I said them aloud for all to hear.
I sat staring up at the stars, wondering if Alphanderry's music had ever found its way toward these eternal lights. And then Kane's gruff voice brought me back to earth.
'Our lives are our lives, and we shouldn't give them up too easily,' he said to Master Juwain. 'So, I'll sing better when we hold the Lightstone in our hands.'
I fell off to sleep that night holding the hilt of Alkaladur in my hand. I prayed for the thousandth time that I might never again use this sword to take others' lives in defense of mine, but only to find my way through to the Lightstone.
The next day we had our first sight of Sakai. After a breakfast of fried eggs and toasted rye bread, we set out and soon pushed our way between the two hills where we had encamped. A line of low mountains lay ahead of us. We found a pass cutting through this chain, and worked our way over it. And when we crossed over to the other side, we found that we had come to the end of the Yrnanir's country.
By chance, it seemed, Ymiru had led us to the exact spot on earth that we had first sought. For here was the great hinge in the White Mountains. To our right, toward the south, the line of mountains that we had just crossed quickly gained elevation as they built toward a wall of white peaks running off into the distance. These were the mountains of the Yorgos Range, and most of Elivagar was spread across their ridges and valleys. To our left, toward the south and east, rose the rocky masses of the Nagarshath. It chilled me merely to look up the unbroken chain of these vast upthrustings of the earth, with their jagged, white, ice-frozen crests. There was no way, I thought, that either man or beast could survive in such great heights. Surely our only hope, as we had discussed, was to pass through Sakai by way of the broad plateau opening out between the two mountain ranges straight ahead of us.
'So that is Sakai,' Maram said as we stood by the horses on the side of the mountain. The wind was out of the west, at our backs, and threatened to push us down its slopes. 'Well, I don't like the
look of it.'
Neither did I. The land below was windswept and sere, its brown grasses and patches of bare earth already showing occasional shags of snow. It went on and on toward the gray haze of the horizon. I thought I could make out, off in the distance, outcroppings of dark rock marking the face of this forbidding plateau. It did not seem a place where people would live. And yet I knew that when we went down into it, we would likely find nomads herding their flocks - or the Red Dragon's cavalry riding the borders of his dread-ful realm.
'So.' Kane said as the wind whipped up his snowy hair. 'So.'
Atara stood near me, staring down into Sakai as if she had seen it before in her crystal sphere.
Maram looked at Ymiru doubtfully. 'You said that you've led raids down into that?'
'No, not here,' Ymiru said. 'Our battles with the Beast's armies were almost a hundred miles to the south.'
'But you still propose to lead us across it?'
'No,' Ymiru said, 'I don't.'
We all looked at him in surprise, even as did Maram, who said, 'But you were to lead us through Sakai. Has seeing it changed your mind?'
'I will lead you through Sakai,' Ymiru said. His hard blue eyes looked to the left as he pointed at the mountains of the Nagarshath. 'That, too, be Sakai.'
Although the wind was burning Maram's face bright red, for a moment the color drained from his cheeks. 'But there's no way through those mountains!'
'No, there be a way,' Ymiru said. The coldness of his eyes made me want to shiver.
'An ancient way - we call it the Wailing Way.'
He told us that long ago his ancestors had built a system of roads, tunnels and bridges through the Nagarshath in order to help them fight their wars against Morjin.
There, along the icy peaks of these high mountains, the wind wailed almost continually. And there, too, the mothers of the Ymanir had wailed for many hundreds of years to see so many of their sons and daughters slain.
'It took the Beast a long, long time to drive us from the Nagarshath,' Ymiru told us.
'But the mountains were too vast, and we were too few to defend them. So in the end we had to retreat to Elivagar.'
'But surely, then,' Maram said, 'the Red Dragon's men now guard this Wailing Way of yours.'
'No, they would have no reason to - none of my people has been that way for a thousand years.'
'You haven't either?'
'No, I haven't.'
'Then how do you know it still exists?'
'It must still exist,' Ymiru said. 'You've seen how my people build things.'
'But what if the Red Dragon has destroyed it?'
'It is my hrope that he has not,' Ymiru said. 'You see, it was a secret way, and it may be that his men never found it.'
We all stood wondering if Ymiru could find his way through these terrible mountains and so lead us to Argattha through Sakai's back door. In answer, he took off his pack and removed the paper-wrapped package that Burri had given him. It took him only a moment to open it and take out his fathers map.
'What is that?' Maram said crowding close to look at it.
Ymiru held in his hands what seemed a pair of lacquered boards, square in shape and inlaid with various dark woods. With great care Ymiru suddenly pulled away the top board, which was set neatly against the bottom board's rune-carved frame so as to protect its interior surface. This was a smaller square within a square, wrought of a reddish-brown substance that looked much like clay. Indeed Ymiru called it living clay, and said that his great-grandfather had crafted it nearly ninety years before.
'This be one thing my people haven't lost,' Ymiru said. 'Almost every Ymanir family has such a map.'
Maram suddenly reached out his finger to run it over the clay's smooth, unbroken surface. And then Ymiru's great voice suddenly bellowed out and froze him motionless: 'Don't touch that! The living clay must never be touched, or else you'll ruin the map!'
Maram jerked back his hand as if from a heated iron. He said, 'I don't understand how you can call this a map.'
'Watch, little man,' Ymiru said to him. 'If I be steady of hand and clear of mind, you'll see something you've never seen.'
As Ymiru oriented his father's map toward the mountains of the Nagarshath, we all gathered in as close as we could. We watched at Ymiru closed his eyes and slowly shifted the position of his furry feet about the bare ground. He seemed to draw strength from it and something else. Almost as slowly as the turning of the earth, he rotated the clay-laden board, apparently seeking to position it along lines that only he could apprehend.
And then without warning, the map's living day began moving about as if being molded by invisible hands. In places, fissures and furrows marked its rippling surface even as bits of day formed themselves into ridges and crests, and thrust upward in long, jagged lines that looked like miniature mountain ranges. It took very little time for this transformation to occur. But when it was completed, as I saw to my amazement, Ymiru held in his hands an exact replica of the mountains that lay before us.
'This be a map of the nearer mountains of the Nagarshath,' Ymiru said, opening his eyes. He pointed down with his chin. 'Do you see the valley behind the front range?'
Of course, we all could make out the deep groove in the clay behind the map's front mountain.s But when I looked out at the world, through the cold- air that hung heavy beneath the blue sky, all I could see was a vast, white wall of rocky peaks edging Sakai's umber plateau. If a valley lay beyond these very real mountains, the map could see it but I couldn't.
'If the map is true,' Master Juwain said, pointing his finger at the gleaming clay, 'then it seems the valley
runs for many miles.'
'The map be true,' Ymiru said, looking down at it proudly. 'And the valley be nearly eighty miles long. It will take us a third of the way to Argattha.'
'But what is the magic of this map?' Maram asked him. 'I've never heard of such magic.'
Ymiru's eyes warmed as he looked out upon Sakai. And then to Maram, he said,
'The world be a great and glorious place. And through it, along its valleys and rivers and within its hills, pulses the currents of the earth - much as your blood pulses through your big nose and follows its contours. The living clay resonates with these currents. And so it hrolds within its form the forms of the earth.'
Master Juwain s clear gray eyes fixed on the map. And then he said, 'But not all the earth, it seems.'
'No, there be a limit to what the map can model,' Ymiru said. 'If it be oriented with the greatest skill, it will show the terrain ahead to a distance of a hundred miles but no more.'
Then,' I said, pointing at the edge of the map, 'there is no way for us to know what lies beyond this valley.'
'No, not until we've covered some further distance,' Ymiru said. 'But it be my hrope that we'll find other valleys paralleling this one. The line of Nagarshath runs toward Argattha, and so must its valleys.'
'And this Wailing Way of yours?' Kane asked him. 'Does it follow the Nagarshath's valleys, too?'
'It be said that it does.'
'Do you think you can find it?'
Ymiru looked down at the map as he nodded his head. 'That be my hrope.'
With his marvelous map revealing a possible way through the moun-tains, it seemed that we might not have to brave Sakai's plateau after all. But I was reluctant to commit to this new course. At least on the plateau below us, there would be abundant grass for the horses.
'There be grass in the mountains' valleys, I think,' Ymiru said. 'At least the lower valleys.'
As he pointed out, the horses' packs were still full of the oats that we had gathered for our journey. 'And if the worst befalls and the horses starve, you can always eat them and continue the journey afoot.'
Just then Altaru nickered nervously, and I looked at Ymiru as if he had suggested eating my own brother. Ymiru, who had watched in horror as we savored the taste of our salted pork, could not quite understand the different kind of love that we held for our horses.
'Come, Val,' Kane said to me. 'There are risks in whatever path we take.'
After a quick council it was decided that the greater risk was in riding straight across Sakai's plateau with barely a rock for cover. And so, as Ymiru turned his attention away from his map and its surface molded itself back into a flat sheet of clay, we steeled ourselves to cross over the Nagarshath's great mountains and approach Argattha along the Wailing Way.
Chapter 39
And so we went into Sakai. It was the work of the rest of the day to fight our way over the nearest pass in this towering front range. We had a bad time of it. Atara slipped on an ice-glazed rock and nearly broke her leg. The horses suffered grievously in the thin air, panting and sweating until their fur froze in the cold. We put blankets over them to ease their shivering, but it didn't seem to help very much.
When the wind rose to a screaming howl as we crested the pass, whipping up flurries of snow, it seemed that our great, white coats didn't help us much, either.
'I'm cold, I'm tired,' Maram complained as he drove himself into the wind and pulled at Iolo's reins. To either side of us were towers of rock and clouds of snow; beneath the powder at our feet was a mat of old snow made hard as ice by a season of melting and refreezing. 'In fact, I'm very cold,' Maram called out into the bitter air.
I'm so cold that I'm ... frozen! Oh, my Lord, my fingers are frozen! I can't feel them!'
I hastened to his side and helped him pull off the mittens that Audhumla had knitted him. The tips of his fingers were hard and white. I placed them between my hands and blew on them to warm them. Then Master Juwain came over to take a look.
'I was afraid of this,' Master Juwain said, gently pressing hid knotty fingers against Maram's.
Dread cut through Maram like a shark's fin breaking cold waters. He said, 'Is there anything you can do? Never to touch a woman again, never to feel -'
'I think,' Master Juwain said, 'we can save the arm.'
He winked as he said this, and his obvious care and confidence reassured Maram somewhat. He told me to keep working on Maram's fingers until I had completely thawed them; he told Maram to keep his hands in his pockets close to his body until we made camp that night and he could heal Maram's savaged flesh with his varistei.
'All right,' Maram said. 'But if this is Sakai, I've had enough of it already.'
:
So had I. So, I thought, had all of us - except perhaps Ymiru, who consented to take Iolo's reins and lead the descent down into the valley that his map had showed.
Here, in this windy groove in the earth tens of miles long, we found a few stunted dead trees that provided us wood for a fire. There was a little grass for the horses, too, and water that ran down its center in a little brown stream. The valley seemed too high to shelter much life beyond some marmots and a few rock goats. Blessedly, we seemed the only people to have set foot here for a thousand years.
Our camp that night was a cold one. Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, accomplished the minor miracle of fully restoring Maram to himself. Maram vowed to exercise more caution on the long journey that still lay ahead of us. I knew that he would. No man, I thought, had a greater fondness for his various appendages.
For the next four days we worked our way down the valley. I didn't like it that we had so little cover here. But there seemed no one to see us, except the occasional vultures circling on the mountain thermals high above us. We made good time and good distance. The horses held steady and so did we. By the afternoon of our fifth day in Sakai, with the valley abruptly coming to an end in a great massif that blocked our way, we were all gathering our strength for yet another foray into the grim, mountain heights.
Ymiru's map showed a pass off to our right, hidden by a great buttress of the massif ahead of us. We climbed up the rocky slope at the valley's very end, praying that the map proved true. And so it did. After an hour of hard, panting work, we came upon a break in the massif, the highest pass yet that we had tried to cross. Master Juwain took his first look at this huge saddle of snow and ice, and thought it was too high to cross. And so, for a moment, did I. And then, at the very center of the pass, I noticed what seemed a cleft cut straight through it. It looked much like the Telemesh Gate that we had passed through from Mesh into Ishka.
'So,' Kane said to Ymiru, looking at him strangely, 'your people once used firestones against the earth.'
As Ymiru stared up at the pass, I sensed some deep, dark thing devour ing his insides. There was great doubt in him, and great sadness, too.
'Yes, we used firestones,' he said, pointing upward. Thus we made the Wailing Way.'
Liljana shifted about uneasily, as if trying to gain respite from the fierce wind pounding against the shawl she had wrapped around her head. I felt within her the same dread that crept up my legs into my spine: that here it wasn't just the wind that wailed but the very earth itself.
If ever there had been a road leading up to the pass, snow and the relentless work of the seasons had long since obliterated it. But the cleft through the pass itself remained much as the Ymanir's firestones had burned it long ago. And on the other side, below some of the deepest snowfields we had plowed through yet, we found an ancient track leading down from the heights.
We followed this band of packed earth and stone for many miles, all that afternoon and for the next ten days. It wound its way toward the southeast through the furrows between great ice-capped prominences. In places, where it led across a mountain's slope, it was cunningly cut so as to be hidden behind rock and ridgeline from the vantage of the valleys farther below. In other places it disappeared altogether, and there Ymiru had
to trust his instinct, following the logic of the land around pinnacles, across basins, until he found the track again. It was a high road, this Wailing Way that the Ymanir had built. In most of the valleys through which it ran, we could find only a little grass for the horses; a few were altogether barren and seemed nothing more than chutes of rocky earth.
This starkness of Sakai appalled us all. But it was nothing, I thought, against the much deeper ugliness that had been worked into the land by the hand of man. The occasional tunnels - through icy ridges too high to cross - seemed like holes cut through the flesh of the earth into her very bones. And worse, by far, were the open pits scooped out the high meadows or basins, sometimes out of the sides of the mountains themselves. They were like sores in the earth, like festering wounds that hadn't healed after even thousands of years. Something in their making, perhaps the piles of slag torn up from the ground, seemed to have poisoned the earth currents that Ymiru had spoken of, for near them nothing would grow. I was given to understand that other parts of Sakai were much more devastated and blighted than this.
'This must be the work of the Beast,' Ymiru explained to us, pointing at a circular pock in the valley far below us. 'It be told that his men have dug such pits all across Sakai.'
'But why?' Maram asked him. 'Are there diamonds here? Gold?'
I had my sword drawn and pointing east to see if the Lightstone still lay in that direction. In the reflected sunlight off its silvery surface, a sudden thought flashed through my mind.
'The Red Dragon does seek gold,' I said. 'The true gold, from which he hopes to forge another Lightstone.'
Ymiru looked at me strangely, with a deep sadness. 'So it be, so it be.'
This mark of the Beast disturbed me, and all of us, for if Morjin's men had once come here, they might come again. I felt his presence all around me, in the jagged knifeblades of the ridgelines, in the pinnacles' icy spears, and most of all, in the bitter wind. As promised, it swept across the Nagarshajh as through a dragon's teeth and wailed without relief. It bit at my bones,it carried in its icy gusts whispers of torment and death. As we drew closer to Morjin and the seat of his power on earth, it seemed that he was seeking me even as I sought the Lightstone, calling me as always to surrender up my will and dreams and kneel before him.
The Lightstone Page 88