‘Seven,’ I said, watching Altaru browse on a bit of grass, ‘and our horses, too.’
I thought it strange that an animal should be able to pass into the Lokii’s wood, but then I recalled that it had been my wise, black stallion who had found his way (and ours) into the first of the Vilds. Altaru’s awareness, I thought, in its own way might be higher than that of most men – or at least deeper and more primeval. But that did not explain how my other companions’ mounts had managed to ‘set’ the forest so that they could enter it as well.
Aukai did not have a very satisfactory explanation for this. All that he could manage to tell us was: ‘When a man and horse move together, there must be a sharing of awareness. Or perhaps your horses, being as one with you, were able to enter the Forest with you. I do not really know.’
I nodded my head as I considered this. Then I asked him, ‘There was a thing attached to me even more completely than was my horse. A dark thing. And yet it seems not to have made the passage to this place.’
‘Yes, the Ahrimana,’ Aukai said with great distaste. ‘For a long time, it has wandered the world, seeking entrance to the Forest. But it cannot bear to behold the trees here. And much else. And so it can never enter the Forest. It is bound to Ea, and finds its home most readily in the darkest of places.’
I did not like to consider the implications of his words, although they accorded closely enough with what Kane had told me.
‘But come,’ Aukai finally said, holding out his hand to me. He smiled at Bemossed and Estrella, and the rest of us. ‘Your other companions will be waiting for you when the time comes for you to leave. Now is the time for other things. You must eat and restore yourself. And then speak with the El Alajin.’
It seemed that we had no better choice than to go where Aukai beckoned us. He led the way through the great astor trees, and my friends and I led our horses by their reins as we walked along in wonder. I felt so glad at being able to see again that I almost forgot the exhaustion that weighed down every particle of my body. Our journey, though, took us a good seven miles, or so I guessed, and by the time we neared the end of it, I was almost sleeping on my feet. The weariness cramping my stomach and other muscles made me doubt if I would be able to eat any of the foods that Aukai’s people had prepared for us.
However, as in the other Vilds, the Lokii set out a feast of the most delicious things. On a large lawn within a great circle of astors, we met the rest of Aukai’s people: some five hundred men, women and laughing children, who had come here to greet us. As we had before, we sat at one of the leaf-woven mats that served as tables. Aukai presented to us some of the most honored of the Lokii: a man named Kele, and three small but striking women: Anouhe, Sharais and Eilai – and others. Anouhe had a spray of wispy white hair and an air of kindness about her that reminded me of my grandmother. We ate of the bounty of the Forest, and then afterward Anouhe passed around a bowl full of golden timanas. These sacred fruits, which the astors bore only once every seven years, afforded lasting visions of the Timpum to all who tasted them who did not then die from the power and beauty of the experience. Daj and Estrella, of course, as children, were still not permitted to put their teeth to the timanas, but Abrasax and Master Virang took great wonder from what they ate and then beheld. And I took great strength from a clear, sweet drink that Anouhe poured just for me: the sap taken from a young astor tree. Miraculously, like a cool wind blowing everything clean, it drove away my body’s weariness and cleared the haze from my head. When it grew dark and the stars came out, I almost didn’t want to sleep – for the fifth straight night. But sleep I must, as Anouhe told me, for on the morrow Ondin would come to the Forest, and I must face her with a freshness of the eye and the spirit.
I awoke just after dawn to find the glade nearly deserted. The sun’s golden light warmed the leaves of the astors and illumined the forms of my friends resting beside me. All except for Kane, that is. He stood watching over us as silently as the silver-barked trees all around us. Off perhaps fifty paces, Aukai and Anouhe gathered at the center of the glade as if waiting for someone. From a bush nearby, a lark sang out its morning song.
My friends and I then roused ourselves and bathed in a nearby stream. I put on a clean tunic embroidered with the silver swan and seven stars of the Elahads – and of my distant ancestors long before Elahad had come to earth. We breakfasted on some fresh fruit. And then we walked out into the center of the glade to join Aukai and Anouhe.
Abrasax, who had a mind every bit as sharp and curious as Master Juwain’s, asked Aukai, ‘Will the Elijin come here into this place as we did into the Forest?’
‘She will come into the Forest as you did,’ Aukai told him. ‘But into what part of it, not even the Immortal Ones can know. And so, most likely, we will have to wait for Ondin to walk here.’
And so wait we did. While the trees around us brightened with whole flocks of birds and uncountable numbers of Timpum, we looked for the great Elijin to appear. The summer sun, sometimes yellow and sometimes red, rose above the crowns of the trees. The glade filled with a warm and vivid light.
And then, from out of the east, I saw a white form moving against the woods’ colors of silver, gold and green. Ondin, I knew this must be, a women who was also something more – and yet she walked toward us with an animal grace that hinted of great power. Then she stepped closer, and I thought rather of a waterfall flowing across smooth rocks and sparkling in the sun. By the time she entered the glade so that I could look upon her in all her glory, she seemed more like the sun itself: brilliant, beautiful and beaming out all the hope and warmth of life.
She carried herself perfectly straight, though perfectly naturally and without obvious effort. She wore nothing more than a white gown, which covered her tall, lithe body from neck to knee. Her long hair, black as jet, fell down past her shoulders. Her aquiline nose seemed to split the sun’s rays and scatter this radiance across her face so that her ivory skin gleamed. I could not say that in the loveliness and symmetry of her features she was more beautiful than the most beautiful of Valari women: Vareva or my mother, for instance. But in Ondin gathered a power and grace that seemed otherworldly in its perfection. It stunned my eyes and caused me to stare at her in wonder.
As Ondin drew up close to us, Aukai took charge of making the presentations. Then Ondin spoke to each of us in turn, pronouncing our names in her rich, ringing voice as if to honor us. I could not keep myself from staring at her, for I felt sure that I had seen her before, if only in my dreams.
‘Grandmaster Abrasax,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘I have hoped my path would cross yours.’
She seemed even wiser than this wisest of men. I could not guess her age: she might have been thirty years old – or thirty thousand.
‘Alphanderry – famed minstrel,’ she said, addressing the sparkling form of my old companion as if he were a real man. And then, more mysteriously: ‘You have come so far, and have only a little farther to go.’
Then she turned to Kane. After gazing at him deeply, she uttered a single name that seemed to echo through the glade and the vast, open spaces of time: ‘Kalkin.’
Kane, his black eyes blazing, clamped his hand to his sword’s hilt as he suddenly thundered at her: ‘Do not call me by that name!’
‘I call you as you are,’ she told him in a voice that rang out sweet but sure, ‘and not as you wish you could cease to be.’
I had never known anyone or anything able to intimidate Kane. But as Ondin stared back at him with eyes every bit as black and brilliant as his own, I felt a strange fear come alive within him. It seemed that he could not bear to look upon her. And so he stared down at his hard, clenched hand as if in disappointment and dread.
Then Abrasax, trying to be kind, said to Kane, ‘Bright she is, indeed, but no more so than you. In truth –’
‘Say no more!’ Kane snarled at him. ‘I won’t hear it, do you understand?’
Abrasax bowed his head to Kane, then looked at him as
if he did understand my savage friend’s most terrible wounds.
Ondin did not press matters with Kane – but neither did she let his dark mood gloom her. She finally turned to me, and her smile was like a honey tea warming my heart. And she said to me, ‘Valashu Elahad, ni al’Adar – you have changed.’
I stood still gazing at the marvel of her, as did everyone else. Abrasax, I thought, the Brotherhood’s Master Reader, might have spoken of the perfect progression of the fires that whirled within each of Ondin’s chakras, the colors of each ingathering and then strengthening each other so as to cast a brilliant aura about her being. I, however, had no such talent. Even so, I could not help sensing her splendor, for it seemed at once both numinous and utterly real.
‘You speak,’ I said to her, ‘as if you had seen me before – and not in a scryer’s visions.’
I wondered how Ondin – and Aukai – seemed to know so much about me and the world of Ea beyond this Vild.
‘But we have met before!’ Ondin said to me.
‘Where, then? In the dreamworld?’
‘No, here. In this very place. When you were seven years old.’
I stared at her as if she had told me that I really had wings and could fly.
‘You do not remember, I know,’ she said. ‘But it is time that you should remember.’
She nodded at Anouhe, who now held a wooden cup full of a bright green liquor that might have been the juice of crushed grass. Anouhe gave the cup to Ondin, who inhaled its fragrance and then handed it to me.
‘There is no danger in this,’ Ondin told me, ‘but only remembrance. Drink, Valashu, and know what has truly been.’
Because I wanted to solve the mystery that Ondin had presented me – and because I trusted her – I put the cup to my lips and took a drink. The liquor tasted at once sweet and peppery, cool and bitter. I could not guess from what fruits or plants Anouhe had brewed it.
Upon swallowing, the liquor streaked like fire straight down through my insides. Before it even reached my belly, it seemed, I did feel myself flying, as if a catapult had flung me straight up into the sky’s empty space. There came a moment of blinding brilliance. And then, as if a fireflower had opened inside my mind fully formed, I remembered what Ondin had hinted to me:
On my seventh birthday, my father had taken me on my first hunting trip into the woods behind Lord Harsha’s farm. Two of my brothers, Asaru and Yarashan, had come with us. They had each put arrows into the same deer at the same moment, and then argued over whose had killed it. And as they stood beneath the elms disputing with each other and my father judged their deeds, I had wandered off. I made my way deeper into the woods, drawn by the call of a scarlet tanager – and something else. I remembered thinking that I could walk to the end of the woods and right up the slopes of Mount Eluru to the very stars. Instead, I had somehow walked straight into the Forest. Now, as I looked around the glade at the silvery astor trees and the glowing stellulars, I relived my wonder at beholding this magical place for the first time sixteen years before.
‘I did come here!’ I shouted in astonishment. I looked at Aukai. ‘You were here! You taught me how to listen to the animals, and call them to me!’
Aukai smiled hugely as he nodded his head and whistled like a wood thrush.
‘And you,’ I said, turning to Anouhe, ‘gave me a drink that you told me would keep me from dying, should I ever take any wounds that became infected.’
She, too, smiled as I pressed my hand to my side where Salmelu’s sword had driven through me during our duel. I noticed that Abrasax, Master Virang and Bemossed were looking at me in amazement.
‘And you,’ I said, bowing my head to Ondin, ‘were waiting for me here. You played the flute with me and taught me three songs! You told me that music would quicken my spirit.’
I remembered leaving the Forest and walking away from it holding the flute that Ondin had given me: the very same one that I had years later passed on to Estrella. This beautiful girl smiled as she now took out this slip of wood and held it up to the shining sun.
‘And it has quickened it,’ Ondin said to me. ‘As much else has, too. You have such a bright spirit, Valashu Elahad. So bright, and so strong.’
‘But why did I forget this place?’ I asked her. ‘And forget you?’
Ondin looked down at the Cup of Remembrance, as she called it, that I still held in my hand. Then she nodded at Anouhe to take it and told me, ‘Because I asked this wise one to give you to drink from the Cup of Oblivion.’
‘But why?’
‘Because,’ Ondin explained, ‘in looking upon the glory of this place, you did not want to return to your woods. And since you had to return, we took away your memory of the Forest so that it would not haunt you.’
‘But why did I have to go back? I might have remained here and spent my whole life making music with the birds.’
Ondin smiled at this. ‘You said the same thing when you were seven years old. But you had to go back to Ea to fulfill your fate, which you would have found impossible to do if you lamented the darkness all around you while always longing for the brightness of the Forest.’
‘My fate, you say? But what do you know of that? Can not a man make his own fate?’
I noticed Ondin looking at the sword I had strapped over my shoulder, and I felt its weight pulling at me.
‘Your fate,’ she told me, ‘was to fight – and fight you have done.’
‘Yes, I have. But always with an eye toward the end of war, when I would have time to make music again.’
‘And that time is coming. When war shall end, or all things shall end. And you have your part to play in that.’
‘Yes, but what part?’ I asked her.
I was never to know if Ondin possessed the gift of looking into others’ minds as Liljana could. But she seemed able to look into my soul – and those of Abrasax, Master Virang, Bemossed and Kane. She seemed to sense, all in a moment, the nature of the argument that divided us as to how Morjin must be fought.
‘You are Valashu ni al’Adar,’ she told me, ‘descendant of the Lightstone’s first Guardian and one of the first Valari. And the Valari were once warriors of the spirit, and must be again.’
‘Others have told me that,’ I said to her. I drew out my bright blade from its sheath. ‘But fate, it seems, has also called me to be a warrior of the sword.’
‘So it seems,’ she said, smiling at me. ‘But not just any sword.’
I pressed my hand to my chest and said, ‘That which I hold inside myself is not enough to defeat Morjin as people wish.’
‘No? Do you know that, Valashu? I have come here to tell you that the true Alkaladur has not yet been fully forged. And so no one has ever wielded it as it should be wielded.’
I thought of the great War of the Stone that the angels (and many Valari) had fought across the heavens for a million years, and one of its most terrible moments: when the Amshahs, led by Kalkin, had tried to touch Angra Mainyu with a splendid light and return him to the Law of the One. In an amphitheater outside of Tria, one of the ghostly Urudjin had recited these verses to us, and more recently, Kane:
In ruth the warrior went to war,
A host of angels in his train:
Ten thousand Amshahs, all who swore
To heal the Dark One’s bitter pain.
With Kalkin, splendid Solajin
And Varkoth, Set and Ashtoreth –
The greatest of the Galadin
Went forth to vanquish fear of death.
And Urukin and Baradin,
In all their pity, pomp and pride:
The brightest of the Elijin
In many thousands fought and died.
Their gift, valarda, opened them:
Into their hearts a fell hate poured;
This turned the warrior’s stratagem
For none could wield the sacred sword.
Alkaladur! Alkaladur!
The Brightest Blade, the Sword that Shone,
Wh
ich men have named the Opener,
Was meant for one and one alone.
Kane, the very warrior spoken of in the verse, stared at Ondin with bottomless black eyes full of pain. And I said to her, ‘If the tale is a true one, then all the angels, even Ashtoreth herself, could not together forge what you call the true Alkaladur. Angra Mainyu turned the force of their souls back upon them! And slew all those who could be slain! And so why should you speak to me as if I can have anything to do with Alkaladur’s forging, much less wielding it as you desire?’
She watched the sun’s light play on my sword’s silver blade, and she said to me, ‘But you must know that you must have something to do with its forging. As all who follow the Law must. There will come a day when the Amshahs, in our millions, will again strike the soul force into Angra Mainyu’s heart.’
As she spoke these words, Kane ground his jaws together, and his whole being seemed to writhe with fire.
‘But you failed once,’ I said to Ondin. ‘Why, then? Why couldn’t the ancient Maitreyas heal Angra Mainyu?’
‘That is not known,’ Ondin told us sadly. ‘But the great Maitreya, who will lead all worlds into the Age of Light, has yet to come forth.’
At this Estrella’s large deep eyes seemed to catch up Bemossed’s brightness and give it back a hundredfold. Then everyone else looked at him, too.
And Ondin, feeling the weight of our expectation, said to us, ‘I am the messenger of Ashtoreth, but not even she knows who this great Maitreya will be. All we can say is that the Maitreya has not yet quickened and come into his power.’
Her words did not distress Bemossed. He smiled at Ondin as if at least one person existed who understood him.
I thought again of the verse’s refrain:
Alkaladur! Alkaladur!
The Brightest Blade, the Sword that Shone,
Which men have named the Opener,
Was meant for one and one alone.
‘Then the great Maitreya,’ I said, ‘must be the one for whom the true Alkaladur was intended. The verse tells that none of the ancients could wield it.’
The Diamond Warriors Page 23