For most of the rest of the day, our march through the summer woods might have seemed a pleasant hike, if not for the gradual rising of the track and our urgency. Birds in great numbers called out to each other from branch to branch, and deer and elk had the good sense to go bounding off through the trees so as to avoid our hunters’ arrows. The sound of thousands of boots grinding against stones swelled outward through the forest and echoed off walls of bare rock around those steep parts of the mountain where few trees would grow. I did not fear my men giving the alarm. Almost no one lived in these wilds of Kaash, and those who did would never betray us to the Waashians. Even so, I commanded my men to remove the bells from around their ankles. Although I thought it unlikely that King Sandarkan would send any scouts down this path from the north, I did not want the tinkling of silver to alert them from afar and give them more time to escape from Kane and other knights whom I would have to send after them.
We camped that night off the side of the track, on semi-level ground beneath great trees or perched precariously on rocky slopes, even as Lord Zandru had said. Our luck had held good. The evening began warmly enough, or rather, with as much warmth as ever found its way to Kaash’s high mountains. Our small campfires gave us good comfort, and we scarcely needed to wrap ourselves in our cloaks except for the hardness of the stony earth beneath us. But then, a couple of hours after midnight, a storm blew in. Dark clouds devoured the moon and stars, and a cold rain fell upon us like waves of the icy sea. Then, we desperately needed our cloaks, and more. The rain doused our fires and left us in nearly total blackness. Many of my men had to endure this misery in whatever spot they had laid down that night, for movement along the slopes above or below the track might prove fatal. I, however, had the good fortune of encamping with my friends on a saddle of earth almost perfectly flat. The few trees above us gave us little protection against the slanting rain. But at least we didn’t have to worry about an icy torrent sweeping us down the side of the mountain.
‘Ah,’ Maram said to me as we sat huddled together for warmth, ‘I’m tired, wet and cold. So damn cold – I’ve never been this cold before.’
He spoke in low tones so that Sar Shivalad, Joshu Kadar, Siraj the Younger and my other Guardians huddled nearby could not hear him. But Kane, Liljana, Master Juwain, Daj, Estrella and Alphanderry, pressed up close, must have made out his every word, despite the great noise of the rain. I heard Alphanderry chuckling with amusement, and sensed Kane smiling through the dark even as I did.
And then Liljana’s voice cracked out into the nearly-drowned air: ‘You were as cold as a man could stand when we crossed the Crescent Mountains into Eanna, and then in the Nagarshath, too. And last year, coming down from the White Mountains into Acadu.’
‘Yes, yes, I was,’ Maram’s voice spilled out into the rain. ‘But this is worse.’
‘Why is it that each hardship you endure is worse than the last?’
‘Why indeed? I suppose that is the nature and perversity of suffering: the more we endure, the more we are able to endure, if you know what I mean. And so the more we must suffer, and do. In the end, we become nothing more than a single, raw nerve utterly exposed to all the world’s outrages. Even if a strong nerve, it is true. And so it is the very strongest among us who must live through the worst of hells.’
I thought about this as I listened to Kane’s deep, disturbed breathing beside me. Had I ever known a man so strong or who had endured such incredible torments? Then I looked through the dark for Bemossed, who was trying to sleep with the Brotherhood’s Masters only twenty yards from us, but I could not see him.
‘And that is why,’ Maram added, ‘a man needs a bit of brandy at such times to numb his nerves. Ah, one might even say that the strongest of men need the strongest of brandy’
‘Drink if you must, then,’ I told him. ‘I’m sure you must have a bottle stowed in your saddlebags.’
‘Must I? Well, I suppose I have. But I have also made a vow.’
‘Which you have broken before, at lesser need.’
‘So what if I have? A vow should be like a signpost that keeps a man pointed on the right path, and not a dungeon’s cell imprisoning him. That being said, I won’t drink so long as there are men spread out in this damn rain with nothing to warm them. I won’t ease my own suffering only to watch as others freeze to death.’
I smiled at this and told him: ‘The warriors you speak of are men of the mountains. They won’t die tonight’
‘No? Well, perhaps they won’t quite die. But they’ll wish they did. And then, the day after tomorrow, supposing that we can get down off this damn mountain, we’ll have to face the Waashians. And then …’
He did not finish his sentence. His words died into the pounding of the torrential rain.
Somehow we did all survive that bitterly cold night. In the morning, still freezing in the pouring rain, my men marched onward again with nothing more to put into their bellies than a little dried beef and cold battle biscuits. I led the way along the treacherous track. We had to go much slower, especially around the slopes of Mount Ihsan’s great buttresses, for the track in many places became little more than slips of mud hiding stones that could turn a man’s ankle or lame a horse’s hoof. Lord Zandru did not have a good memory of this route, but he offered his anticipation that the track would dip down into more level country after only a couple more miles of snaking through some of the mountain’s steepest terrain.
I placed much hope in this, for our delay had already put to the question our timely arrival on the battlefield south of Harban. And then, after I had ridden Altaru up and around another sparsely wooded saddle, I came out suddenly upon one of Mount Ihsan’s steepest slopes. And my hope washed away. For I saw ahead me, for a stretch of about half a mile, that the entire side of the mountain had come down in a rockslide that had completely buried the track.
I dismounted and stood on a large shelf of earth gazing in despair ahead of me. Lord Zandru dismounted, too, and came up to me; so did Lord Avijan, Lord Noldashan, Kane, Liljana and my other friends.
‘This is the end, then,’ Lord Zandru sighed out. He was one of those men who are quick to see in any event the worst possible outcomes. ‘We have taken a chance and lost’
‘No, there must be a way,’ I said. ‘There is always a way’
The rain seemed suddenly to beat down even harder. It did not take much of an eye to see that even a mountain goat would not have dared the mud and rocks spread out above and below the track – or rather, where the track had once been.
‘I can’t see any other way,’ Master Juwain said to me, scanning the steep and rugged side of the mountain. ‘Unless you turn the army around and go back a few miles and try bushwhacking across the ground lower down. But that would take another day, at least, and the horses could not negotiate such terrain in any case.’
‘No, we can’t go back now,’ I told him. I grasped the hilt of my sword to give strength to my trembling hand and stop the shivering ripping through me. And then a thought came to me. ‘Perhaps we can clear a path.’
‘Through that?’ Lord Zandru said, pointing at the mass of sodden earth churned up ahead of us. ‘It would take a thousand men working with picks and shovels for three days. And then who is to say another slide wouldn’t bury your army as it marched past?’
My men, I thought, could build a good route along this slope, for my father had well-trained them to such work, as he had me. But Lord Zandru was right about one thing: we did not have enough time.
‘Maram!’ I called out. ‘Could you clear a way? With your firestone?’
Maram, always eager for a chance at heroics that did not cost him too much effort or risk of his life, strode over to stand beside me. He took out his great red gelstei, nearly a foot long. Raindrops broke like a waterfall against the ruby crystal.
‘I don’t know’ he shouted through the rain. ‘I haven’t used it very much since Argattha – and never for so great a work as this.’
&n
bsp; He glanced back at the dull diamond gleam of ten thousand men spread out in a line for three miles across the rocky buttresses of Mount Ihsan. Then he glanced up at the dark, closed-in sky.
‘In any case,’ he said, ‘there is too little light. I’d be lucky to get a few sparks out of my stone, let alone the fire needed to melt through rock.’
‘You could try’ I said to him. ‘With a firestone no bigger than yours, Telemesh built the way between Mesh and Ishka.’
Maram must have clearly remembered the day that we had passed through the mile-long Telemesh Gate, melted out of the rock between Mounts Raaskel and Korukel, for he smiled hugely. Then he said, ‘But it took Telemesh six days to cut his channel, or so it is said.’
‘Telemesh,’ I told him, ‘boiled into the air a good part of a mountain. You have much less to do: merely to clear away a little mud and a few rocks.’
Again, he looked out at the collapsed slope ahead of us. Then he nodded his head and called out: ‘Very well – I shall try! Stand back, now! Stand back as Maram Marshayk makes a new path!’
Maram stood at the edge of the shelf, perhaps four hundred yards from the place where the track disappeared into the mass of the rockslide. He gathered in all his concentration as he pointed his crystal at the collapsed slope. Then he let loose a stream of fire at it.
The flames that he summoned from his gelstei, however, while much more than a few sparks, were much less than was needed to melt anything larger than a pebble. After half an hour of such fruitless work, he threw up his hands in frustration.
‘There is too little light,’ he said again, looking up at the sky. ‘This is hopeless.’
Master Storr, the Master Galastei, stepped up to Maram then. He had his sopping cloak pulled tightly around his old, freckled face. He told him, ‘I have made a study of the firestones. Although I have not been so fortunate as to have one to work with, much is written about them in the old texts. You say it is too dark, that your crystal cannot drink in the sun’s fires, and so give them back. But what of the fires of the earth?’
He spoke, of course, of the telluric currents that burned most heatedly beneath Ea’s mountains – the very same earth fires that Morjin would use to free Angra Mainyu.
‘I’m sure,’ Master Storr told Maram, ‘that you could learn to summon them, with our help.’
He explained to Maram that the ‘feel’ of the telluric currents would be more subtle than that of the sun’s blazing rays. And so Maram would have to open himself to these deep flames and pass them up through his body into his firestone.
‘Now is the time,’ Abrasax added, moving closer to Maram. ‘You must not let the currents get caught up in that overly-worked second chakra of yours.’
Maram rested his hand just above his belt: the very place in his body from which he had summoned those fires that had too often gotten him into trouble. Then I remembered lines from a verse that he had composed:
But ‘low the belly burns sweet fire,
The sweetest way to slake desire.
In clasp of woman, warmth of wine
A honeyed bliss and true divine.
I am a second chakra man;
I take my pleasure where I can;
At tavern, table or divan –
I am a second chakra man.
‘This is surely a day,’ Abrasax told him, ‘for opening all your chakras. And we shall help you.’
As at the Brotherhood’s school, the Seven positioned themselves around Maram. With Master Okuth dead, Abrasax asked Master Juwain to stand in his place. He gave him Master Okuth’s old gelstei: the emerald crystal that was one of the seven Great Gelstei. Each of the other Masters held one of these ancient stones toward Maram.
What followed was no exercise or mere discipline designed toward the perfection of Maram’s body and being. The whole world, it seemed, depended on what now transpired. I watched as the various gelstei came alive in the Seven’s hands; their radiating colors, I imagined, found a perfect resonance inside each of Maram’s chakras. I wondered if Abrasax could perceive a river of light, like a rainbow, flowing inside him? Whatever invisible fires filled Maram, the flames that suddenly erupted from his red crystal split the air for all to see. The heat of this lightning burned the very rain into steam.
‘It flares!’ Daj cried out, pointing at Maram. He kept back from Maram with Lord Avijan, Sar Shivalad and others. ‘As it did when Maram scorched the dragon, it flares!’
The thousands of warriors held up back around the curve of the mountain must have wondered at these unexpected fireworks.
‘All right then!’ Maram cried out. ‘Stand back! Stand back, I say!’
He, himself, could not heed his own warning. He planted himself at the edge of the shelf, gripping his firestone in both hands as if holding on for his life. His crystal brightened to an almost blinding crimson color as fire continued to pour out of its point in what seemed a dense and incredibly hot stream. Maram directed it against the mass of the rockslide. Mud and stones, in nearly an instant, melted and ran down the slopes in a glowing orange lava. The water in the ground heated into steam and exploded up into the air like a boiling fountain. It carried with it tons of hot grit and ash, which the wind and rain washed back upon us. All standing upon the shelf soon found themselves coated with this grime. The very earth seemed to hiss, crack and scream as Maram directed his terrible fire at it.
So thick did the cloud of ash and steam grow that he had to cease his efforts occasionally to let it subside – else we would all have choked to death. And Maram would not have been able to see where to lay his flames. Three times these flames nearly got out of control and threatened to consume us all in an explosion that might have sundered the very mountain. Such, the ancients warned, was the power of the firestones. But all the while that Maram swept his red crystal back and forth along the mountain’s slope, Kane stood by him holding in his hand his dark crystal. It damped the worst of the firestone’s burning light and kept it under control. For just such a purpose, as Kane had told us, the ancients had fabricated the black gelstei.
At last, after some hours, Maram lowered his red stone and looked out upon his work. After the rain had swept the air clean, we could all see the channel he had cut along the mountain’s side. It seemed a path made of solid rock.
‘Behold!’ Maram’s voice boomed out like thunder. ‘Behold and rejoice: Sar Maram’s Passage!’
He seemed well-pleased to name his creation, and even more pleased with himself. We all rejoiced then, as he had suggested. We gave thanks, too, for the driving rain, which sizzled off the hot rock along Maram’s newly-made track, even as it cooled it enough so that men could move down it without burning their feet.
So it was that Maram cleared the way for our army to continue on around Mount Ihsan and come out behind the Waashians at the Rajabash – if only we could now drive ourselves to march quickly enough.
13
It is impossible for a man, burdened by more than fifty pounds of armor, weapons, clothing, water and food, to run more than a short distance. Even so, I pressed my warriors to such a fast walk that others might have called it a run. For all the rest of that day, I led my army around the slopes of Mount Ihsan. We had some good luck when the rain stopped in the late afternoon. We must have covered ten miles of some of the Morning Mountains’ most rugged terrain by the time dusk fell upon the world. When we came out into the forested hills northwest of Harban, we were all so exhausted we were ready to crawl off beneath the trees and drop onto the bracken. But we could not sleep just yet. The Kaashan and Waashian armies would meet on the battlefield early the next morning, and we still had another fifteen miles to march in order to reach it.
The track that we had been following, as Lord Zandru told us, found its end in Harban. From there, a good road led down along the Rajabash to the proposed battlefield. But we could not set out on this route, for surely King Sandarkan would have left warriors behind in Harban to secure his rear. Therefore we needed to march
cross-country – and now at night.
Lord Zandru found a woodcutter who knew of a track that would take us a good way through the forest toward the battlefield. When the moon and stars came out, we had just enough light to make our way through the ghostly trees. Lord Zandru, after dropping back to observe the heavy motions of Lord Tanu’s and Lord Tomavar’s warriors as they trudged along, said to me, ‘Your men are already spent, and even if you come to the battlefield in time, they won’t be able to fight’
‘They won’t have to fight,’ I told him. ‘But only appear ready to fight.’
Lord Avijan, hearing this as we rode along through the starlit trees, turned to Maram and said, ‘If the warriors cannot lift their shields and work their spears, then you can strike down our enemy with that sorcerer’s stone of yours.’
‘Could I?’ Maram asked, taking out his firestone and holding it up to the thin light sifting down through the crowns of the trees. ‘Ah, I suppose I could. But I won’t. You see, I’ve taken a vow never again to burn men with its fire.’
I commanded my army to halt only once that night, for a break of half an hour. It was a dangerous thing to do, for it seemed that no one could remain awake to rouse the others when the time came – no one, that is, except Kane. I wondered for the thousandth time at his inexhaustible vitality. He seemed no more tired by our mountain’s passage than he would have been after a walk in the woods.
The Diamond Warriors Page 26