Lord of Lies (87 page)

'All that Lord Valashu said
is
true!' a great voice boomed out. Maram strode forward like a great bear and stood in front of Lord Tomavar. 'I was present at the gate with him and Lord Raasharu.'

Lord Tomavar nodded his head to him. 'Everyone knows what a faithful friend you have been to Lord Valashu. Perhaps
too
faithful.' 'Are you calling me a liar?' Maram bellowed out. His face flushed deep red and seemed to burn through the brown curls of his beard. His hand fell upon the hilt of his sword. He would have to be mad to draw upon lord Tomavar But it seemed that he might for the hellish furnace of war had forged him into more of a Valari knight than even he suspected,

'No, I would never call
you
a liar,' Lord Tomavar said. 'But in the heat of the moment, with the news of the battle, you might easily have misheard Lord Raasharu's words. And so there Is no dishonor in that.'

'I did
not
mishear him!' Maram called out. 'As for my own honor, I'm not concerned. But you should not stain the honor of my friend. Val has told you nothing but the truth! He's the most truthful man I know - sometimes
too
damn truthful! He would never lie!'

Lord Tomavar stood very still as he glared at me. With his diamond armor and face all smeared with blood, as he gathered in all his wrath, he was terrible to behold. And then, like a crack of thunder, he cried out; 'In Tria, when Lord Valashu was asked if he was the Maitreya, he affirmed that he was. Thus his honor is already stained with the shame of this lie if no other.'

After that Lord Tomavar fell quiet, and so did Maram - and everyone else assembled there. Now there was truly nothing more to say.

The sun finally disappeared behind the mountains, and a shadow fell upon the field. I felt the eyes of thirteen thousand warriors burning into me, I could not move; I did not want to breathe. I stood ensnared in a web of evil, lies and great blame.

Then Lord Tanu, true to the ancient forms, called out: 'Who will draw his sword to Lord Valashu as King?'

As with a single motion, with the ringing of steel like the rush of a cold wind, five thousand knights and warriors drew their swords to me. They held their bright kalamas pointing at me like so many rays of light. But eight thousand men did not draw their swords. And so I could not be King of Mesh.

I tried to keep my face as stern as those of the lords and master knights standing near me I slipped the great ring from my finger and for a moment held it tight inside my fist. And then I cast it down into the grass. I turned about so that no one could see the shame burning my face and the tears in my eyes. I began walking north, toward the woods that edged the Culhadosh Commons. I was only faintly aware of Altaru nickering as he followed after me and my friends and their horses as well. I moved without purpose or destination, I wanted only to keep on walking, through the Valley of the Swans and out of Mesh, until I walked right off the edge of the world.

A
fter the burials, we took shelter on Lord Harsha's farm eight miles farther up the valley. Forest surrounded his fields on three sides, affording us a sense of isolation. Atara, Liljana and Estrella settled into one room of Lord Harsha's stout, stone house, while Maram, Kane, Master Juwain, and Daj shared two others. 1 spread out my cloak on some clean straw in the barn, next to the stalls of Lord Harsha's gray mare and his other horses. Behira, having finished with her duties with the wounded from the battle, prepared us meals of good, solid Meshian fare: bacon, eggs and hotcakes in the morning; beef and barley soup for lunch; lamb roasts with herbs and potatoes for supper. I could hardly eat any of it. Liljana, who helped with the cooking, kept urging upon me these tasty viands; she told me that I must at least try to strengthen my body for what was to come.

'It's an old saying of our Sisterhood,' she told me. 'Nourish the body, and the spirit will flourish.'

And I told her: 'We of Mesh say that the spirit alone gives the body life.'

I thought of my grandmother's fierce will to speak with me before she died, and I knew this was true.

For most of five days, I lay as one dead in the half-darkness of the barn, listening to the chickens squawk, breathing in the scent of straw, manure and old wood. I watched a spider weave an elaborate web between the rafters above me. I tried not to think of what I had seen in the ruins of my family's burnt-out castle. I dwelled on all the deeds of my life. My friends, in their wisdom, left me alone.

And then, on a cloudy day with the first chill of autumn in the air, I roused myself and went to work. I saw to Altaru's shoeing and changed the poultice where a sword had scored his flank during the batde. I began gathering in stores: dried beef and dried plums; cheeses as yellow as old paper; year-old hickory nuts; and battle-biscuits almost hard enough to drive nails. My friends watched in silence as I made these preparations. And then, when Maram could bear it no longer, he caught me out behind the barn oiling my old suit of mail that I had retrieved from my rooms in the castle.

'What are you doing?' he asked me.

'What does it look like I'm doing?' I said. Heavy rings of steel jangled in my hands as I examined them for any broken or weak links. 'I cannot remain in Mesh.'

Maram, too, had put aside his diamond armor; he stood before me wearing a plain half-tunic and trousers, topped with a leather hunting jacket. He looked every inch a Valari knight at his leisure.

'But where are you going?' he asked me.

And I told him: 'To Argattha.'

He shook his head as he looked out to the west and watched the clouds in the sky building thicker and darker. 'Ah, Val, Val, it's a bad season to be setting out on
any
journey. But
this -
surely you know this is madness?'

'I don't care.'

'But I
do
care,' he told me. 'You promised Kane to stay alive.'

'No, the spirit of the promise was that I would not kill myself. And I won't.'

'But you're throwing your life away!'

'Am I? Are you a scryer then, that you can see the future?'

'But you'll never even get past the guards at Argattha's gates! They'll shackle you in chains and drag you before Morjin. And before you die, he'll -'

'I'm not afraid any more, Maram.'

He slapped his fist into his hand as his fat cheeks puffed out. 'No? No? Are you
proud
of that? To be without fear is to be without hope.'

'Hope,' I murmured, shaking my head.

'I know, I know,' he told me. 'But what else can we do but try to find a good outcome to all the horrible things that have happened?'

'Life isn't a story,' I said to him. 'It doesn't have a happy ending.'

'Don't say that, Val. We're all involved in a great story, as old as time, whose ending hasn't yet been written.'

I looked down at the rings of oily steel in my hands, and I said, 'Perhaps it hasn't. But it's not hard to see what that ending now must be.'

'Are
you
a scryer?' he said to me. Then he grasped my arm and told me, 'I am afraid enough for both of us. And so I won't let you go.'

'How will you stop me?'

'I won't let you go ... alone.'

His courage caused me gasp against the shock of pain that stabbed through my chest. I gazed into his eyes, all soft and brown and shining with his regard for me.

'No, you can't come with me,'I told him. 'It would be your death.'

'And how will you stop
me,
my friend?'

He smiled at me, and for a few moments, we stood there taking each other's measure. Then a gray, cold drizzle began sifting down from the sky; I covered my suit of armor with my cloak and told him, 'I
won't
let you go to Argattha.'

Later that day, as I walked through the woods beyond the stone wall at the edge of Lord Harsha's fields, I came upon a great, old elm tree that had once been felled by lightning. I sat upon its moss-covered trunk. Rain pattered against leaves and soaked into my cloak. Atara found me there, staring at the dark trees all about me as I rubbed the scar on my forehead.

'Maram told me I might find you here,' Atara said to me. 'He told me where you're thinking of going.'

She pulled her lionskin cloak more tightly around her shoulders as she sat down beside me. I said to her, 'If he tires of being a Valari knight, he can always find work as a spy.'

She smiled at this, then took my hand. 'It's cold, here, Val. Why don't you come in out of the rain and sit by the fire?'

I shook my head as I pointed at the mat of dripping ferns spread across the ground. 'This is the spot where the bear nearly killed me He nearly killed Asaru, too. All my life, Asaru told everyone that I'd saved
his
life.'

She said nothing as she oriented her head facing the place that I had pointed out. I wondered if she could 'see' me as a young boy plunging my knife into the huge, brown bear's back in a frantic effort to keep the beast from mauling Asaru.

'Where the Ikurians were upon me,' I said to her, 'he gave me back my life. But not in repayment. Only. .
.
in love. You should have seen the look in his eyes, just before he died. He didn't care that he would have made a better king than I.'

Her hand tightened around mine, and its warmth flowed into me.

'I can't believe I'll never talk to him again,' I said. 'My mother, my father, all of them -I can't believe they're really gone.'

Atara's blindfold, I saw, was wet with rain, if not tears. I thought it cruel that she could never weep again, just as Liljana could not laugh.

'What was the
point
of us going to Argattha,' I asked her, 'if it all came to this?'

'I don't know, Val.'

'But you're suppose to see everything.'

'I wish I could.'

'So many dead,' I murmured. 'And in the end, we only succeeded in giving the Lightstone back to Morjin. I did.'

'You mustn't blame yourself.'

'Who should I blame then? Kane, for not seeing all of Morjin's plots and perfidies? You? The One for creating the world?'

'Please, do - blame us, if that would be easier for you.'

I squeezed her hand, and pressed it to my forehead. 'I'm sorry,' I told her.

'And I'm sorry, too,' she said. 'But not even a scryer can make out all ends. Something good may yet come of what has happened in a way that we can't see.'

'Something good,' I said, shaking my head. 'I should have done better to have claimed the Lightstone from the very beginning.'

'Please, don't say that.'

'Why not? If I had come forth as the Maitreya, that day with Baltasar in my father's hall, I might have united the Valari without even going to Tria. Morjin would never have attacked Mesh, and the Lightstone would be mine.'

'And what then?' she asked me. 'You know the prophecy. Would they come to call you the Great Silver Swan? Would you have that name become a curse, like the Red Dragon?'

'At least,' I told her, 'my people would still be alive.'

'There are some things more terrible than death,' she said, rubbing at her blindfold. 'Do you doubt that you could become as Morjin -or worse?'

I recalled the look on Ravik Kirriland's face as I had struck him down. I sat there in silence, listening to the rain.

'You would have brought great evil to the world,' she said to me. 'Great destruction and death.'

'Could the suffering that entailed have been any worse?'

'I don't know. I don't know how to measure such a thing. Do you?'

I pressed my fingers against her wrist, where I could feel her heart sending out pulses of blood like an anguished and savage thing. I said, 'There's no end to suffering.'

'No, perhaps not,' she said. 'But I must believe it has a purpose.'

I smiled grimly as I recalled Morjin's letter, and said, 'To torment us into hating the One so that we might become as angels?'

She smiled, too, as she shook her head. 'No, Val. But there is some-thing strange about suffering. It carves the soul, hollows it out - and in the end leaves room for it to hold more joy.'

'You
say that?'

I stared at her blindfold, and I wondered what the hollows beneath it held inside their scoops of darkness?

'I
do
say that,' she told me. 'I have to make myself believe that there is still hope for all of us.'

'Have you been talking to Maram, then?'

She let go of my hand and brought out her scryer's sphere. Drops of rain broke against the white gelstei, and ran in streaks down the curves of the crystal.

'Have you seen these joys with which you hope we'll be blessed?' I asked her.

She smiled as she- shivered against the cold of the rain. And then she told me, 'Many believe that the kristei was forged to show visions of the future. But its true power is to create it.'

That was all she said to me, then. She stood up to make the short journey back to Lord Marsha's house. She left me sitting on my soggy log; she left me to wonder how a little ball of dear crystal - no less a man - could create anything good at all.

The next day the rain deepened, and I spent most of it in the barn, hunched beneath my cloak and brooding upon things to come, late in the afternoon, the peace of Lord Harsha's farm was broken when a rider dressed all in black came galloping up the road. I hurried out of the barn to see Kane emerge from the house and walk up to confer with this stranger. That he was no Valari I could tell immediately: he was rather short and thick, and his broad face and dense black beard reminded me of the Ikurians, But his eyes were bright blue, and his skin was fair, and I could not guess what land he called home. An air of danger and darkness surrounded him. I was sure that he was a master of the mysterious Black Brotherhood.

Kane, however, did not present this man to me - or to any of us. The tension in Kane's brutal body and flashing black eyes warned us away. The rider did not remain to partake of Lord Harsha's hospitality. As soon as he had finished his business, without a word of greeting to any us, he pulled his horse about and rode off again into the rain.