The Lightstone

by David Zindell

Kane came up to him and rumpled his curly hair, 'Ioj it still is, my friend. We've still time to make it home before the snows come.'

  We started walking down through the valley then. First light found us working our way across the ridge that hid the little canyon to the north of Skartaru. With nerves laid bare by what we had endured, we listened and looked for any sign of pursuit But the slowly brightening foothills rang with the cries of wolves and bluebirds rather than the hoofbeats of Morjin's cavalry. We knew that it would be only a matter of time before he or one of his priests sent out riders to patrol the approaches to Skartaru. How much time we had, however, not even Atara could say. And so we came down into the grassy bowl where we had left the horses; there my heart cried out with what it took to be the greatest stroke of fortune of all our journey. For there in the center of the bowl, his black coat burning in the light of the rising sun, Altaru stood sniffing the air as for enemies. Atara's roan mare. Fire, was feeding on the lush grass nearby him, while twelve other horses - all of them mares as well -took their breakfast with her. I was sure that these were the mounts of the knights in the cave.

  Altaru had obviously gathered a harem about him. But he seemed to have driven off the magnificent Iolo, for what stallion will endure another sniffing about his new brides? When Maram discovered this, he wanted to weep bitter tears that he would have to find another horse to carry him homeward. Kane, Liljana and Master Juwain had better luck their geldings stood off about a quarter mile from the herd as if awaiting our return. We walked down into the bowl, where I whistled for Altaru. His ears pricked up, and he let loose a great whinny in return; it was like the music of the earth carried along with the day's first wind. I waited to see if he would come to me.

  It seemed a shame to take him from his newly-found freedom, to say nothing of his harem. But he and I had a covenant between us. So long as we had breath in our lungs and blood in our veins, we were fated to face, and fight, our enemies together.

  At last he came trotting over to greet me. He nuzzled my face; I breathed into his nostrils and told him that a dragon had been killed - although the Great Red Dragon remained alive. We still had very far to ride together, I said, if he was willing to bear my weight. In answer, he nickered softly and licked my ear. His great heart beat like a war drum. He pawed the ground impatiently as I brought forth the saddle that I had hidden with the others and put it on his back.

  The others saddled their horses, too. Maram chose out of the herd a big mare to ride; the smallest we gave to Daj, who had surprised us all by declaring that he could ride. 'My father,' he told us, 'was a knight.'

  'In what land, lad?' Kane asked him.

  Finally Daj consented to naming his homeland. He looked at Kane in the deepest of trust and said, 'Hesperu. My father, all the knights of the north - there was a rebellion, you see. But we were defeated. Killed and enslaved.'

  'Hesperu is very far away,' Kane told him. 'I'm afraid there's no way we can take you home.'

  'I know,' he said. And then a moment later, he admitted, 'I have no home.'

  He said no more as he buckled around his horse the small saddle that we had taken from Morjin's men. It was still too big for him. But he rode well enough, I thought, patting his mare on the neck and being gentle with her flanks, which were scarred from the spurs of its previous owner.

  Most of the day, however, we spent in walking, rather than riding, along the foothills of the White Mountains. The sun was high in the sky by the time we reached the canyon by which we had come down out of the Nagarshath. There we said goodbye to Ymiru. He would be traveling west, while we must journey east.

  'But it's too dangerous for you to cross the mountains alone!' Maram said to him. He looked at the remains of his arm and shook his head. 'And surely you're still too weak from what the dragon did to you.'

  Ymiru bowed his huge head to Master Juwain, and then said, 'I've had the help of Ea's greatest healer - I feel as strong as a bear.' At the mention of Maram's least favorite animal, he cast his eyes about the tree-shrouded hills to look for one of the great, white bears that were said to haunt the Nagarshath. Then he studied Ymiru.

  Master Juwain had healed his pierced side, and his green gelstei seemed to have restored him to his great vitality.

  'Still,' Maram said, 'those mountains, two hundred and fifty miles of them, and you alone. And with winter coming on, it's a journey that-'

  'Only I can make,' Ymiru said, dapping him on the arm. 'Don't worry, little man, I shall be all right. But I must go hrome.'

  He went on to say that he must tell his people the great news that the Lightstone had been found. Such a miracle, he said, surely heralded the return of the Star People, and so Alundil must be prepared for this great event.

  'And the Ymanir must prepare for war,' he said. 'The Great Beast told me that my people would be the next to feel his wrath.'

  Liljana came forward and laid her hand on his white fur. 'I saw this in his mind. His hatred of your land, and the desire to destroy it.'

  'He has the strength, I think,' Ymiru admitted. His sad smile made me recall the hosts of men and the preparations for war that we had seen in Argattha. 'But we can still fight a while longer.'

  'You won't fight alone,' I promised him.

  Ymiru's face brightened as he asked me, 'Will the Valari take up the sword against him, then?'

  'We'll have to,' I assured him. 'With what we've seen on this journey, what other choice will we have?'

  He smiled again as he put down his club; then we clasped hands like brothers.

  'I shall miss you, Valashu Elahad,' he said to me.

  'And I, you,' I told him.

  Liljana brought up one of the mares, which she and Master Juwain had heaped with most of the saddlebags of food. Ymiru would need every last biscuit of it on his long journey.

  'Farewell,' she told him. 'May you walk in the light of the One.'

  The others, too, said their goodbyes. And then, one last time, I took out the Lightstone and placed it in Ymiru's hand. Its radiance spilled over him like the gold of the sun.

  'Someday,' he told me, 'I'll have to journey to Mesh to learn this cup's secrets.'

  'You'll always be welcome,' I said to him.

  'Or perhaps someday,' he said, handing the Lightstone back to me, 'you'll bring this to Alundil.'

  'Perhaps I will,' I said.

  Gone from his fearsome face was any hint of gloom; I saw there instead only bright, shining hope. He bowed his head to me, and then turned to tie the mare's reins around his mutilated arm. And he called out, 'A hrorse! Who would ever have thought that a Ymanir would make company of a hrorse!'

  And then, leading his horse with one hand, his great war club in the other, he turned to the west and began his long, lonely walk up into the great white mountains of the Nagarshath.

  After he had disappeared around the curve of the canyon, we made our final preparations for our journey. Since we had sixteen horses among the seven of us, we had remounts to tie behind us. And Master Juwain had a bandage to tie around Atara. Because she could not bear us to endure the sight of her missing eyes, she begged Master Juwain to cover them. In his wooden chest, he found a bolt of clean white cloth, which he pulled over her eye hollows and temples. I thought it looked less like a bandage than a blindfold.

  At last we were ready to leave Sakai. And so we mounted our horses and turned them toward the east. Just below the foothills, the golden plains of the Wendrush gleamed in the sunlight as far as the eye could see. We rode straight down into them; there was nothing else to do. Now, as we found ourselves in the middle of a sea of grass or crested a rise, we would be visible from miles away: clear targets for Morjin's cavalry or any of the Sarni who might decide to divest us of our horses, our lives or more precious treasure.

  In truth, on all of Ea there is no other place more perilous to travelers than the Wendrush. Here, between the Morning Mountains and the White, prides of lions hunted antelope and the great, shaggy sagosk; sometimes a darkn
ess fell upon their fierce, red hearts, and then they hunted men. Of all the Sarni tribes, in their plundering for sport or gold, perhaps only the Kurmak or Niuriu tempered their ferocity with mercy - and even they had no love of strangers. The worst of the tribes, it was said, was the Zayak, whose country we now had to cross. Somehow, Morjin had made allies of them - if it was possible to enlist the aid of warriors so proudly independent that they were said to demand tribute even of Morjin's men should they wish to ride across their lands.

  For all that first day of our flight from Argattha, we saw no sign of Sarni or of pursuit from Sakai. We rode as fast as we dared, over the swaying grasses of the soft, black earth. The sky was an immense blue dome resting upon the fundament of the far-off horizon; all about us was grass made golden by autumn's last heat. When night came, still we didn't pause in our rush across the plains. With the rising of the wind, we rode long past the twilight hour into the falling darkness.

  The stars came out like a million candles lighting the black ocean of the heavens.

  They called us ever onward; their splendor lifted up our spirits and reminded us how good it was to be free.

  The next day, however, as we looked back toward the Black Mountain still looming over the plain, we found ourselves pursued by riders. They crested a knoll behind us; there were twenty of them, bearing neither the shining mail nor lances of Morjin's knights but rather the leather armor and great curved bows of the Sarni. 'So,' Kane said to Atara, 'it's your people.'

  He turned his horse about and made ready for one last battle. We all knew that it was hopeless to try to outdistance the Zayaks' lithe steppe ponies with our larger mounts

  - especially with so great and stolid a war horse as Altaru.

  'Please don't call them my people,' Atara said to Kane. 'Anyone sent by Morjin is as much my enemy as yours.'

  As we soon discovered, these twenty warriors with their blue-painted faces and wildly streaming yellow hair had been sent by Morjin - or rather by the captains of his cavalry that his priests had sent after us. They charged straight at us, firing arrows as they rode. And we charged them. Two of the warriors underestimated Altaru's speed over short distances; these died quickly beneath my long lance, which had the weight of Altaru's driving body behind it. A third warrior got in the way of Kane's falling sword, and so surrendered his spirit to the sky. A fourth cried out,

  'Give us the treasure that you stole from Lord Morjin!' even as Maram ducked beneath an arrow that he loosed and managed to race forward and duel with him to his death. Still, the battle would have gone badly for us if Atara hadn't countered the Zayaks' arrows with a murderous stream of her own. She shot off five of them with astonishing accuracy before most of the enemy came close enough to use their bows. And five warriors fell from their ponies with feathered shafts sticking out of their chests. It was the finest archery I had ever seen - and the Zayaks must have thought that, too. The sight of the blinded Atara, whipping her red horse about and firing off death with every crack of her bowstring, utterly unnerved these hold but superstitious warriors. Their leader, a fierce man with a huge, drooping, yellow mustache, cast her an awe-stricken look and cried out: 'Imakla! The Manslayer is imakla! '

  And with that, he pointed his pony toward the rolling land to the north and led the survivors of his company. In a wild, galloping retreat over the plains.

  We did not escape this brief but deadly encounter unscathed. An arrow killed Liljana's horse beneath her; she barely managed to avoid being crushed in its fall, and had to choose out mother from our remounts. One of the Zayaks' arrows had buried itself in Altaru's flank. It was a bad wound, and Master Juwain drew it only with difficulty. If not for the radiance of the green gelstei, now blazing like emerald fire in its nearness to the Lightstone, it might have been many days before Altaru would have been able to walk without limping. Likewise Master Juwain helped heal Kane of the wound caused by an arrow that had pierced his mail and transfixed his shoulder.

  After we had made ready to set out again, I turned to Atara and asked, 'What does imakla mean?'

  She seemed reluctant to answer me. But finally, she turned her blindfolded head toward me and said, 'The imakil are the immortal dead warriors of ages past, heroes who have done some great deed. Some warriors are said to ride with them and draw upon their strength. They are imakla, and may not be touched.'

  And with that, this brave woman who rode with the dead, pointed her horse toward the rising sun and led us through the Zayaks' country. As we trotted along, Maram offered his opinion that we had surely outdistanced Morjin's cavalry, for why else would they have sent the Zayaks after us?

  'They spoke of the cup, ' he said to her. 'Do you think they know it's the Lightstone?'

  'Hmmph!' Atara said to him. 'If they knew that, they'd have called down the entire Zayak host upon us. And then Morjin would have lost all hope of regaining it.'

  We discovered the next day that the Zayaks almost certainly knew nothing of the treasure that we bore through their land. About seventy miles out onto the plain, we ran into a much larger band of warriors. At the sight of Atara leading us toward them, they turned their horses and fled from us. It seemed that word of a blind, imakla warrior of the Manslayers had spread ahead of us like fire through dry grass.

  Still, we took no assurance from this seeming miracle. We resolved to leave the Zayaks' county as quickly as we could. Our straightest path across the Wendrush would have taken us across most of their land, which was bordered by the White Mountains in the west, by the Blood River in the north, and by the Jade in the south.

  It was toward this river that we now turned. We didn't mind adding a few extra miles to our journey. In any case, soon we must cross the Astu River, and it would be much easier first to cross the Jade and then the Astu to the south of where the Jade emptied into it.

  And so the following day, with the fording of the cold waters that flowed down from the White Mountains, we passed into the country of the Danladi tribe. Their warriors, too, seemed to have been warned of Atara, for they let us ride through their lands unmolested. They were no friends of Morjin; but neither did they extend amity to a warrior of the Kurmak - and most especially not to Maram or Kane or any of the rest of us. It didn't matter. The weather held fine, with warm days of abundant sunshine and cold, clear nights. Thus we had no need of shelter, for we made our bed on the soft prairie grass and covered ourselves in our cloaks. When our food ran out, Atara shot an antelope, which gave us the sweetest of meats. Maram washed this feast down with the last of the kalvaas that we had brought from Alundil. Then he turned his eyes eastward in anticipation of some good, thick Meshian beer.

  It took us most of three days to cover the hundred and twenty miles between the Jade and the Astu. This great river, here, to the south of where the Jade and the Blood flowed into it, was not nearly so wide as it grew on its course toward the Poru

  - which eventually wound its way across the plains and forests of Alonia, all the way to Tria. Still, it was wide enough. We had to swim the horses across it. By the time we reached the other side, Maram vowed that he would never swim a river again. 'At least not until we cross the Poru,' Atara reminded him. 'Oh, the Poru!' Maram cried out. 'I'd forgotten the Poru!' But this queen of all rivers still lay a hundred and fifty miles to the east. The country to the west of it, here at this latitude, was that of the Niuriu tribe - who were friendly with the Kurmak. When an outrider of one of their clans trotted our way and discovered that Atara was the granddaughter of the great Sajagax, he offered us shelter, meat and fire. We spent that night in the great felt tent of his war chief. As with the other Sarni whom we encountered, Atara remained untouchable: any warrior approaching her to offer food or drink was careful to avert his eyes and very careful not to lay his hands on her or even brush against her garments. This restraint, however, did not in any way diminish the Niuriu's hospitality. As we discovered, the Sarni's enmity toward strangers was overmatched only by the generosity they showed to their friends. The chi
eftain's warriors and wives brought forth platters heaped with roasted antelope, sagosk steaks and coneys grilled over sweetgrass fire. As well, we had rounds of hot, yellow bread dripping with butter and honey and bowls of mare's milk. To Maram's delight, the chieftain himself, who was named Vishakan, brought- forth a bottle of brandy and poured it into our cups with his own hand. And before we fell off to a contented sleep, he presented each of us with a braided leather quirt, with handles trimmed out in beaten silver. On the next day - it proved to be the first of Valte - we made fifty miles over the flat, short-grass steppe. And on the two days following that, we did as well, riding past the great herds of sagosk long past sunset. Although the air grew slightly cooler here in the middle of the Wendrush, the sky deepened to an even more beautiful blue, and the red-orange paintbush and the golden leaves of the cottonwood trees along the watercourses made a great show of color. It would have been the finest leg of our journey homeward if Atara hadn't thrice lost her way for a few hours before regaining her sense of the terrain.

  On the morning of the fourth of Valte, we came to the mighty Poru River. Atara assured Maram that the waters were not nearly so deep as in the spring or summer, when they raged brown down from the mountains. Even so, Maram dreaded this immersion. His unease must have communicated to his horse, because they floated downstream much too far, and so came out upon the Pom's eastern bank a hundred yards from the rest of us. This precipitated the only real crisis of this part of our journey. A great, black-maned lion, lying in wait by the grasses along the river, decided to chase Maram and his horse across the steppe. He almost certainly would have sunk his claws into the flanks of Maram's mare and dragged them down if Atara hadn't killed him with a single arrow shot into his heart.

  'Ah,' Maram said to Atara as we all gathered around the dead lion, 'I suppose I should thank you for saving my life.'

  'I suppose you should,' Atara said to him with a broad smile. 'But I think we're all long past saying thanks for saving each other's lives.'