Lord of Lies (34 page)

'This
farewell,' he said, 'pains me almost more than when you set out to find the Lightstone. And it truly pains me more than my shoulder.'

He winced as he sat up in his bed and looked at me. Yarashan, who had hardly moved from his side for most of two days, handed him a cup of steaming tea, and said, 'All right, then, we'll remain here until Asaru is well enough to ride. Another week, and we can -'

'Two weeks would be better,' I broke in. 'As Master Juwain has prescribed.'

'All right,
two
weeks, then,' Yarashan muttered. 'Long enough that we'll miss the conclave, even if we start out after you.'

Asaru smiled at him and said, 'We'll have to hope our little brother can conclude this affair without us.'

His eyes were like two stars as he looked at me. He seemed to sense that my becoming champion had changed something in me. He grasped my hand and pulled me closer to him so that he could embrace me. 'Farewell, Valashu,' he said to me. 'Return home soon.'

After I had embraced Yarashan as well I went outside and climbed on my horse. And so I led the Guardians out of Nar along the King's Road as we had come. As in our entrance into the city, many people lined the way to cheer us along. And to cheer me. Cries of 'Champion!' 'Lord of Light!' rang out into the air and almost drowned out the thunderous clopping of the horses' hooves. The gold medallion that King Waray had given me pulled heavily at my neck even as the Lightstone (now borne by Sar Hannu) impelled me down the road toward the west, where I might finally learn its secrets.

It was good to go forth with friends and companions into the fresh summer breeze blowing across the land; soon we reached the rippling wheatfields outside the city. I remained alert for sign of discord among the Guardians, for now it wasn't just Meshians and Ishkans riding together, but Anjoris, Kaashans, Atharians, Taroners, Waashians and Lagashuns. Now there were many more possibilities for knight falling out against knight and renewing old hatreds. But
these
knights, it seemed, during the week of the tournament, had grown tired of fighting - at least of fighting each other. In their easy laughter and recounting of feats, I sensed a camaraderie growing as it often did with men who suffered dangers together. Then, too, they were men of honor who strove to honor their vows and their charge to guard the Lightstone. They could not do this as quarrelsome individuals loyal to their kings, but only as Valari knights who rode with me. My gaining of the championship, I knew, had been vital in gaining the devotion of these proud men. For no Valari warrior likes to be led by one of unproven prowess, and in my victory they saw the possibility of their own achievements and the realization of their deepest dreams.

That day I rode at the head of our three long columns, and Estrella rode beside me. She had a calm and gentle touch with her little gelding; I had never seen anyone learn a horse's ways so quickly. Riding in the open air seemed to please her immensely, as did the wind and sun and smell of the summer flowers in the rolling fields about us. Her. slender body was stronger than it looked. She had good stamina for continuing on mile after mile and taking only a few breaks, to water and feed the horses and to feed ourselves. Thirty miles we covered on that first day of our journey out from Nar and as many the next. The unaccustomed abrasion of sitting in a saddle all day must have pained her, but she made no complaint - neither with her ever-silent lips nor with her dark, expressive eyes. Often she would brush aside the soft curls from her face and look at me happily. She seemed always to want to be near me, to serve me, to remind me of the best parts ot myself. It made her happy to make
me
happy, and I loved her for that. And yet, beneath her radiant smiles and quicksilver expressions of delight, something dark and heavy seemed to pull at her heart like a great weight. I felt this most keenly on the evening of our third day of travel, when we reached Loviisa. We made camp by a stream in the hills overlooking the city; above us on the nearby hill loomed the old Aradar castle, abandoned when King Hadaru had built his wooden palace. As the sun set in the west beyond it, this huge pile of stone changed colors, from bone white to an almost glowing and blood-filled red. Estrella sat with me and my friends around our campfire, and she flitted about refilling my bowl with some succulent lamb stew and pouring water into my cup. And in the middle of tendering these little devotions, something about the castle caught her eye. She froze like a fawn caught in a snow tiger's icy stare. As she stared at the castle's keep, at its flaming western wall, fear rushed through her little chest like poison, and her bright and dreamy face fell ashen with nightmare. She began shivering violently. Was she recalling the murder of her sister servants in my father's castle and her helplessness at being trapped outside on its pitch-black wall? Or was she reliving some hideous torment visited upon her in Argattha? She couldn't tell me. All I could do was to cover her with my cloak and hold her next to me until this evil spell had passed. But the immense sorrow that welled up out of her was too much for me to bear. It was like listening to the cries of a million children who had lost their mothers. I found myself suddenly bowing down my head and weeping into Estrella's thick hair even as she broke open and wept as well.

Later, after Behira had taken her off to bed, I walked alone up toward the castle. I stood beneath its towering battlements and looked up at the stars. Why, 1 wondered, were there so many black spaces between these brilliant islands of light? Why must darkness descend every night upon the world, and inevitably, upon men's souls? Was there no help for suffering, then? Men called me the Maitreya, but the cold wind falling down from the sky made me shiver and doubt this, for I couldn't even ease the anguish of a single little girl. As the wolves howled in the hills around me, I wanted to throw back my head and howl, too: at the lights in the heavens, at the pain of the world, at the fire that ignited inside me and made me burn for deeper life.

The next day wag one of bright sun and skies as clear and blue as sapphire. Our way for the next forty or fifty miles, until we reached the mountains, was through a rolling and gradually rising country of rich farms and even richer pastures where countless sheep covered the green hillsides like blankets of white wool. No good roads led to this way, only dirt tracks winding around wheatfields and occasionally cutting straight through acres of rye or barley. The Gaurdians, however had no trouble negotiating such terrain. Upon abandoning our baggage train in Loviisa, we moved even morequickly and easily, though along

somewhat less straight a path. In many places, our three columns had to be consolidated to two or even to one, a single long line of Valari knights strung out like glittering diamonds on a necklace. Late that morning Maram suggested that we ride together behind the rear of the columns so that we might have a space to talk. 'You take too much to heart,' he said to me.

'No in truth, too little.'

'You can't help what you can't help, Val.'

'But it must be helped,' I said. 'Everything must be.'

'But the world is the way it is. The way the One made it to be.'

I thought about this as I tried not to choke on the dust that the hundreds of horses ahead of us kicked up into the air. I thought of the letter Salmelu had delivered to me, and I said, 'Sometimes it seems that Morjin was right, after all.'

Maram always seemed to know what I was thinking. he asked, 'Do you mean, that we should hate the One? Do you. . .
hate
, then?'

'Sometimes. I almost do,' I said. 'When I remember Khaisham, when I think of Atara. And now, when Estrella can't even tell me what she suffers.'

'Morjin wrote that such suffering ultimately leads to our salvation - as I remember, through torturing innocents and rising above them.'

'Yes, and there he errs. In this lies much of his evil. But he is surely right that we were meant to rise, to be as angels. The world it the way the One made it to be, you say. And so are we. Surely the One made us to
make
a better world.'

'Well ending war is one thing. But you can't end suffering itself.'

'Perhaps not. But what is the
meaning
of the Maitreya, then? What would the meaning of my life be if I didn't at least try?'

For much of the morning, as we rode through the pretty country of Ishka. we discussed the prophecies about the Maitreya recorded in the
Saganom Elu
and Master Juwain's hope of discovering much more to the akashic crystal. By noon we had put ten miles behind us, and by the end of the day, another ten. When we made camp in a fallow field that evening, our talk finally turned to more immediate things: to the fine weather we were enjoying; to the high spirits of the knights of eight kingdoms riding as brothers; to the lofty, white peaks of the Morning Mountains rising up before us to the west. As always, Maram feared encountering bears in these wooded heights, His fear increased mile after mile the following day and did not abate, not even when we began digging the fortifications for our nightly camp in the forest below Ishka's largest lake. For he remembered that just to the north of this lake lay the Black Bog.

'There are worse things than bears there,' he said. 'Dark creatures and dragons, I think.'

'But we encountered none on our passage of it.' 'Did we not? What was that ugly thing that flew across the sky?' The Black Bog, it was said, was a portal to the Dark Worlds. On our nightmare journey through it, we had walked on one or more of these worlds before miraculously finding our way back home. It worried Maram that if we could wander out of the bog onto the familiar soil of Ea, so could other things from other places.

'What of the Grays?' he said to me. 'And what if there are worse things than those Soul-Suckers? What of the Dark One himself?'

To the sound of the Guardians digging a moat in the black earth around our encampment, I thought of Angra Mainyu, once the greatest of the Galadin - and now, if Master Juwain was right, the greatest of ghuls who would bring evil to all worlds. What shape had this once-bright being taken on? Was he still fair of form and wondrous in aspect? Or had the vile work of ages twisted him like a blackened worm so that he was hideous to behold?

'Angra Mainyu,' I reassured Maram, 'is bound on Damoom.'

'So Kane says - but what if he's wrong? And what if Morjin finds a way to free him?'

'He won't,' I said, 'as long as we guard the Lightstone. Now, why don't we finish making camp and raise a glass of beer - and forget all this talk of dark creatures and such?'

That night Maram raised more than one glass of thick, dark Ishkan beer. But he did not quite forget his dread of things that might come for him out of the night. And neither did I. Although the Black Bog lay a good twenty-five miles to the north of us, a hint of its terrors wafted across the lake in the faint fetor of rotting vegetation and mires that could suck a man down into the earth. It seemed to ding to our garments and to work its way inside us, even as we broke camp early the next morning and began climbing into the clearer and sweeter air of the mountains. A sense of overwhelming wrongness pervaded me I felt something pursuing me, not necessarily from behind us or from any direction in space, but rather in time, from the past - or perhaps the future. It had the feel of Morjin. But in it also was Angra Mainyu's hatred of life, and all life's cruelty to life; it reeked of blood and screams and the sickness of the soul in surrendering to its worst nightmares. Didn't all evil, like decaying flesh, have the same foul odor? Didn't suffering too? It came to me then that the terrible pain Estrella carried inside her might not have its source in Argattha after all. For if all things took their being from the One - fallen angels and swords no less flowers and trees and bright, singing birds - then might not the blame for Estrella's suffering be laid at the workings and will of this terrible One? For the next two days, this realization oppressed me. I did not speak of it to Maram or Master Juwain, for they had trials of their own. Our passage through the mountains was difficult. The roads over these great peaks of the Shoshan range were slanted and bad. Fierce summer rains found us working our way up or down steep tracks of stone and dirt, which turned to streams of slippery mud beneath our horses' driving hooves. On one of the numerous switchbacks snaking up the sides of the slopes, Sar Jarlath's horse lost its footing and fell against some rocks near a spruce tree, breaking its leg with a sharp crack and ripping open its belly. Sar Jarlath plunged into these rocks as well; miraculously, he suffered only a broken arm. It was not a bad break, and Master Juwain mended it quickly. But the horse had to be put to death. This mercy killing saddened all of us, for he was a great-spirited warhorse that Sar Jarlath had ridden to an honorable seventh place in the long lance competition.

On the last day in the mountains, we passed by the Ishkan fortress of Karkallu and came down into the narrow valley of the Snake River. Beneath gray, heavy skies, we followed its bends and rapids toward the west. It was drier in this broken land, and the silver maples and oaks around us soon gave way to cottonwoods and hawthorn that grew along the watercourses of the Wendrush. We had our first view of the great grasslands late in the afternoon on the fifth of Marud. I led our company up a rocky hill at the mouth of the valley, and there before us for many miles lay a sea of green. Far out to the curving horizon - west, north and south - these dark plains lit up with flashes of lightning from the even darker clouds pressing down upon them. Their oppressive flatness was broken only by a few hummocks and the blue-gray track of the Snake River winding its way toward the much greater Poru a hundred miles farther on. To the south of the Snake, the Adirii tribe of the Sarni held sway; they were allied with the Kurmak, whose lands stretched out north of the river and west of the mountains. Into this open country of antelope, sagosk and lions, I sent three knights: Sar Avram, Lord Noldru the Bold and Baltasar. They were to seek out the headmen of the Kurmak's clans, and if possible, Sajagax himself. For I did not want to lead a force of nearly two hundred knights into unknown country without the permission of those who possessed it. We made camp on a little triangle of land at the confluence of the Snake and a mountain stream that flowed into it. We fortified it heavily. It would be a bad place to be caught in the event of a thunderstorm and a flood. But there, at the gateway to the Wendrush, I feared raging Sarni warriors on horses more than I did raging waters.