Lord of Lies (48 page)

We drew nearer to the center of this barbaric city, and Atara pointed out the tents containing the treasury and armory, and those of Sajagax's concubines and main wives. And then we came to the tent of Sajagax. Its outside was hung with lion skins, while inside, as I would soon discover, it was decorated with sable and ermine and sheets of beaten gold. The Kurmak's great chieftain was waiting for us outside its open doors. To either side of him stood his greatest captains: Urtukar, Mansak, Jaalii, Yaggod, Braggod and his son, Tringax. All were big men, like unto form and appearance with Sajagax.

But in Sajagax himself, I thought, there concentrated the essence of a Sarni warrior. He wore a doublet of antelope skin embroidered with gold and lapis beads. He was an inch taller than I and massive in his gold-girded arms and across his chest. The weight of gold chains hanging from his bull's neck would have bowed down a lesser man. In his thick hand he bore like a staff of kingship his great bow: a double-curved welding of wood, sinew and horn so heavy and thick it was said that none but Sajagax could draw it. His face was heavy, too, and cut 1 harsh planes like the sun-seared steppe. His gray mustaches drooped down beneath hi stoney chin; his long hair was golden-gray braided and bound with golden wire. He had the same brilliant blue eyes that had once sparkled from Atara's countenance. He did not stand on pomp or ceremony, for he gazed upon his granddaughter with an outpouring of adoration for all to see. No one however, would mistake him for a good-natured man. He radiated ferocity
and
willfulness as the Marud sun does heat. As Atara had told me, he could be cruel. Once, when a merchant named Aolun Wohrhan had betrayed him in a business dealing,. Sajagax had allowed that Aolun should have all the gold for which he had lied and cheated. And so he had commanded that the greedy Aolun be staked out on the ground and molten gold poured into his eyes, ears and mouth.

'Atara!' he called out as we all dismounted. His voice was gravelly and bigger even than Maram's, like a battle horn blowing, and blunt as a war hammer, 'My beautiful granddaughter!'

She rushed up to embrace him, and he kissed her lips, and tears welled up in his eyes. His captains looked on disapprovingly, not at his display of emotion but because the Sarni are seldom kind to women.

Atara presented me and many of my companions. Then Sajagax called out, 'Valashu Elahad, Lord Guardian of the Lightstone, you and your warriors are welcome in my house! Never have I had the privilege of entertaining Valari warriors before, except with arrow and sword. But tonight, at least, let there be peace between our peoples. Come! Rest! Eat! Sit with me and let us talk of your journey.'

Urtukar, a fierce old man with a saber scar cutting his face from ear to chin, objected to allowing such a large company of armed Valari knights into Sajagax's tent. But Sajagax gainsayed him. He waved off his concern as he might shoo away a biting fly, bellowing out, 'Do you think I fear these knights? Let them bring their swords to the feast, their lances, too, if they wish. I care not. They are the Guardians of the Lightstone. How are they to guard it if they are stripped of their weapons?'

He was less generous, however, in inviting Behira and Estrella to take meat with him, for Sarni warriors will sit at feast with warriors only. And so Sajagax's eldest wife, Freyara, was summoned to take them to a more private feast with the women in her own tent.

Sajagax led the way into
his
great tent. So huge was this billowing silk structure that it would have required a frame the size of my father's hall to hold it up. Instead, great wooden poles, nearly as long as the masts of a ship, were planted in the ground as the main supports. The guy ropes, I saw, were braided silk. The entire floor was lined with rich and intricate carpets, mostly of blue and gold, for Sajagax was fond of these colors. I looked for a chair or any furniture that might be construed as a throne. But Sajagax required nothing of the sort; indeed he had as much disdain chairs and other decadances as did my father. With a painful stiffness due to many old wounds, he sat down against aground of cushions near the tent's center. His captains sat in a half-circle to his right, while Maram, Lord Harsha, Lord Raasharu Baltasar, Sunjay, Atara and I took our places to his left. Other prominent Kurmak warriors sat in similar circles throughout the tent, as did the rest of the Guardians. The question arose of what to do with Master Juwain, for he bore no weapon and was therefore counted no warrior. Tringax, a young man with bellicose blue eyes, suggested that Master Juwain should dine with the women and children. But I stared at him coldly, and informed him that Master Juwain had stood by my side the length and breadth of Ea and had fought his way into Argattha, a place that even the boldest of the Kurmak warriors might not dare to go. In the end, Tringax relented, and Sajagax invited Master Juwain to sit with us.

The feast began abruptly, with no speeches of welcome or fanfare. The Sarni, given to the extravagant in their possessions, were simple in their taking of food and drink. They cared little for delicacies and not at all for the fine art of cooking. What mattered to them, it seemed, was the abundance of meat. And of bread and beer and bowls of mare's milk, for this is most of what the Sarni consumed. Beautiful young women wearing long silk robes served us legs of lamb, roasted sagosk livers and other steaming victuals on great golden platters. Many of them bore bruises on their faces and on their naked arms, and they were subservient in their manner. Baltasar mistook them for slaves. He was astonished, as I was, when Sajagax told us that they were his newer wives. Sajagax only laughed at our outraged Valari sensibilities. He slapped one of these wives on her rear as he bellowed out, 'What need have we of slaves when we have women?'

Atara, I saw, sat quietly sipping from a goblet of wine as Baltasar and others looked at her. I said to Sajagax, 'But women are the mothers of your children! The mothers of you and all your warriors!'

Sajagax laughed againls he tore off a huge chunk from a lamb's leg with his strong white teeth. 'Yes, and that is what woman are good for.'

'We Valari,' Lord Raasharu said sternly, 'believe that women are meant for much more.'

'Yes, they are good at cooking and gathering sagosk dung, and some of them can even sing.'

Now Baltasar, picking up on his father's reproach, said to Sajagax, 'If a man spoke thusly in the Morning Mountains, he would have to sleep with his sword instead of his wife.'

'Do you fear your women, then?' Sajagax asked. 'You, who are always so fearless in battle?'

'We don't fear them,' Baltasar said. 'But we don't command them, either. Does one command the sun to shine?'

'No, but a
man
was made to master his women. And women were made to be mastered.'

Sajagax looked down at his great hand, thick with callus and scars along his knuckles. It was then that we learned that a Sarni warriors who refused to beat his wife was called a man without a manhood.

I looked at Atara again and said, ''Some women, it seems, are not so easy to master.'

'Indeed, they are not,' Sajagax said, smiling at his granddaughter, 'That's the beauty of the world, isn't it? Most women are sheep but a few are born to be lionesses.'

'From all you've said, it seems surprising that the lions would let them be.'

'Let
them?' Sajagax called out. 'Does one
let
the sun shine? No one lets a women become a warrior.'

I bowed my head toward Atara, and then glanced at Karimah and three others of their Society who sat with the warriors in another circle. 1 said, 'The Manslayers are few; your warriors are many. Surely you could keep these women picking up dung, if you chose to.'

'Could
we? At what price? Have
you
ever tried to make a Manslayer pick up dung. Lord Valashu?'

I admitted that I had not. And then Sajagax continued, 'If we tried to do this, then
we
would have to sleep with our swords at the ready - and our bows and arrows, too.'

I smiled at him and said, 'Do you fear your women, then?'

Sajagax laughed heartily and clapped me on my shoulder to acknowledge that I had scored a point in this verbal jousting that the Sarni relished. And he said to me, 'The Manslayers are
warriors.
They claim for themselves, out of strength, the right to kill. Thus they make others fear them.
They
fear death not. Thus they are twice feared. They escape from having to pick up dung by their willingness to die and to deal death. And in this, as with all warriors, they claim their freedom.'

In
hi
s rough, old voice I heard echoes of the words that Morjin had written to me. I said to him, 'Then is it only the strong who can be free?'

He took a long drink if wine from his goblet as he nodded his head. 'That too, is the beauty of the world, its terrible beauty The strong do as they will; the weak do as they must.'

For a few moments I thought about this as he waited to see what I would say. Finally I spoke, and the answer I gave him was what I might have told Morjin himself if he were sitting with us.

'It is the will of those who are truly strong,' I said, 'to protect the weak. They fear neither death nor other men. Only being unkind.'

But kindness among the Sarni, as I saw, was regarded less a virtue than a boon of the victor toward the vanquished. Their warriors were even more brutal with each other than with their women. Their continual verbal sparring often turned violent; twice during the feast, two of Sajagax's men came to blows, standing and smashing at each other's faces with their fists. Such unseemly displays would never occur in Valari society without swords being drawn in a duel to the death. I watched in amazement as these yellow-haired barbarians quickly spent their fury and then returned to their places, eyeing each other malevolently. They bore each other deep grudges in this testing of their manhood. They, and all who witnessed their combat, would remember who had bested whom. And so it went all their lives. The strongest of them became captains over warriors and chieftains over clan or tribe. In their bluffing and bullying of each other, I better understood a Sarni saying that Atara had told me earlier:

'Every tribe against every tribe; every clan against the tribe; every family against the clan; every man against his family. And all the tribes against the
kradak.'

The Sarni's enmity for me and my men boiled barely beneath the surface like a geyser that might erupt at any moment Sajagax's warriors stared at the glittering armor of my knights as if counting the diamonds there and mentally adding these white gems to their treasure chests. So it had gone for ages. How many times had the Sarni invaded the Morning Mountains hoping to seize our vital mineral wealth? No other people had made war against the Valari so often or with such savagery. And now, here in Sajagax's tent, the Kurmak fired different kinds of arrows at us. Fell words flew from the lips of these wild warriors and stung my men like so many barbs. I overheard one warrior at a nearby circle taunting Sar Hannu of Anjo: 'You look familiar. Weren't you one of the knights who fled from my company at the Battle of the Crooked Field?'

This, I told myself, was only more testing; in anticipation of this, I had issued strict orders that my men should not trade insult for insult, nor under any circumstances draw their swords. Lord Raasharu and my other counselors feared that Sajagax might use such an inci-dent to provoke a battle - and then after I and ail the Guardians lay slaughtered on Sajagax's blood-drenched carpets, Sajagax would claim the Lightstone for himself.

When at last the time for singing and serious drinking was at hand, Sajagax called to see the Lightstone. Sar Elkald of Taron stood and came over to hand the golden cup to me. And then I gave it to Sajagax to hold.

'Beautiful,' Sajagax said as his eyes lit up. The cup seemed lost in his huge hand. 'But so small.'

His hot breath steamed out into the even hotter air of his tent. I could see his image, all fierce with longing, reflected from the numerous golden sheets hung from the tent's walls. Threads of gold showed in the tapestries also displayed there, and the tent's great poles likewise were sheathed with this most precious of metals. So rich were these furnishings, it made one wonder what was left to lock away in Sajagax's treasury.

'So this is the
true
gold,' he said to me as he gazed at the cup. 'Let us hear the story of how you gained it.'

Maram, his face flushed with wine, was only too happy to stand and give an account of the great Quest. He told Sajagax and the Kurmak warriors of all our battles, paying particular attention to his heroics at Khaisham and the arrow wounds he had received there. Our hosts struck their bows against their goblets in acknowledgment of these feats. They were less inclined to believe Maram's description of the invisible bridges that spanned the gorges of the Nagarshath and the great Ymanir who had built them, for it displeased them to imagine a people larger and stronger than themselves. And they would have dismissed the story of Flick altogether if this strange being hadn't suddenly appeared to amaze them with a brilliant display of lights. But they listened in wonder as Maram explained how he had used a firestone to burn an opening into Argattha and then later to wound the great dragon named Angraboda. And when Maram reached the climax of his tale, when the blinded Atara had stood upon Morjin's throne firing arrows into our enemies and felling them by the dozen, many of these grim-faced warriors burst into tears of pride and called out, 'Atara Manslayer! Atara for the Kurmak!'

'Great deeds!' Sajagax exclaimed as Maram sat back down. His hand still gripped the Lightstone, and a golden sheen fell upon his face. He turned to Atara and said, 'You are a glory to our people. The Kurmak have always fought Morjin. And we always will.'

Sajagax now stood to sing out the tale of how the Kurmak and other tribes of the Sarni had ridden to war against Morjin at the Sarburn two whole ages before. His voice blared out like a battle horn, and he needed no minstrel to recall the verses that extolled the deeds of great warriors six thousand years dead. According to his version of this story it was only through the heroics of his Kurmak ancestors that the Lightstone was wrested from Morjin's hand. That many of the Sarni tribes had fought on Morjin's side he neglected to tell. After he had sat back down, I said to him, 'We of the Morning Mountains still sing of the wonder of the Sarni riding with the Valari to battle. But it should be remembered that it was Aramesh who wounded Morjin and took the Lightstone from him.'