The Diamond Warriors Read online

  And with that, she kissed my lips with a desperate blaze of passion, as fiery as the rising sun. Then she adjusted her blindfold, grabbed up her bow and mounted her horse. I watched her ride off with the other Manslayers who had come to Mesh to take her away.

  Later, I sent out envoys to each of the other Nine Kingdoms: Ishka, Waas, Kaash, Anjo, Taron, Athar and Lagash. They were to tell the Valari kings that the Maitreya had come forth and that the Valari must at last unite behind this Shining One. I had little hope for the success of their missions. My plea must surely fall upon deaf ears, I thought, for only two years before I had made a similar argument – with the assertion that I must be the Maitreya.

  By strange chance, even as one of my envoys pounded down the road leading east toward Kaash, an envoy from that kingdom rode toward the west and found his way into our encampment. Lord Zandru the Hammer seemed astonished to discover that I had returned to Mesh to be acclaimed king only the day before. When I learned the purpose of his visit, I immediately called for a council in my pavilion. I invited to sit at my table the greatest lords in Mesh: Lord Harsha, Lord Avijan and Lord Sharad – Lord Jessu and Lord Manthanu, too. And Lord Noldashan. I did not yet know what place Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar would take in my army, and yet no important strategy could be discussed without them. And so with Lord Eldru and Lord Ramjay, and even with Lord Ramanu, Lord Bahram and Lord Kharashan. The Seven, now only six, I also asked to hear Lord Zandru’s tidings. My companions, of course, would not leave my side. As for Bemossed, he had now become the bright star around which all peoples and events on Ea would whirl. I would never allow him to leave my side.

  Lord Zandru, a huge, barrel-chested man with long arms like those of an ape, sat opposite me at the end of the table. He had a face as blunt as the black war hammer emblazoned on his white surcoat. His words, too, for an envoy, were blunt, for he wasted no time getting to the point of his mission, calling out in a deep, almost braying voice: ‘King Valamesh, Lords of Mesh – Kaash needs your help!’

  He told us that after two years of threats and feints, King Sandarkan had finally ordered Waas to complete preparations to make war against Kaash. There was to be a battle, Lord Zandru said, for King Talanu Solaru – my mother’s eldest brother – would not cede to Waas the Arjan Land taken from Waas generations before. But at that time, Kaash had been strong and Waas weak. Now, as Lord Zandru told us, the Kaashans had lost too many warriors in battles against the Atharians, and so were few while the Waashians were many.

  ‘King Talanu can probably put the battle off until mid-Marud,’ Lord Zandru told us. ‘But it will come to battle, and we will lose. And so we will lose the Arjan Land anyway. But all Kaash’s lords and warriors agree with King Talanu on one thing: it is better to lose some dirt and rocks, and a little blood, than our honor’

  At this, Lord Tomavar rapped his lord’s ring upon the edge of the table with a sharp clack as if to command everyone to look at him. It might have been thought that after his defeat the day before, he would have hidden himself inside silence. But as always, he liked to charge into the heart of the battle, whether of swords and spears or words.

  ‘Lord Zandru!’ he called out. ‘Not two years ago, Mesh lost more than four thousand warriors because Kaash would not help us – and whole rivers of blood! Why, then, should we help you!’

  ‘Because,’ Lord Avijan said to him in his cool, controlled voice, ‘we can. And more, because we should. After King Sandarkan has safeguarded his rear against Kaash, he will be free to ally with the Ishkans and turn against us.’

  ‘Damn the Ishkans!’ Lord Ramjay said.

  ‘Damn the Waashians, too!’ Lord Kharashan called out. ‘They killed my boy at the Red Mountain!’

  For a while, as everyone drank cups of chicory coffee and the day deepened toward night, I let these battle-hardened warriors speak their thoughts and debate strategy. I said very little, while my companions said less and the Seven and Bemossed nothing at all.

  Finally, I held up my hand for silence. Everyone looked at me. It was my duty as a king to listen to my counselors and consider their words. But it was also my duty to rule.

  ‘We cannot know,’ I said, ‘how the day would have gone at the Culhadosh Commons if the Kaashans had come to our aid. But is there anyone here who wished that they would not have come? As we looked to them, they now look to us, with desperate hope. As they failed us, with good reason, are we to look for better reason and so fail them?’

  Lord Tomavar banged his whole hand against the table as he practically shouted: ‘But they did fail us, reason or no, and so I say that we should see to our own –’

  I looked at Lord Tomavar then. As I had in the square outside the day before, I looked deep inside him, and suddenly his face reddened as he fell into a shamed silence.

  ‘My apologies, Sire,’ he said, bowing his head to me. ‘When I see a breach in the lines in front of me, I can rush in too quickly.’

  ‘And so you helped my father win more than one battle,’ I told him. Then I nodded at Lord Zandru. ‘But the Kaashans, please remember, are not our enemies but our allies. And that is why we shall help them.’

  As Lord Zandru’s face brightened, I explained that we would need every ally that we could find for the great struggle soon to come. Every lord at my table bowed his head in acceptance of this.

  ‘Very well … Sire,’ Lord Tanu said. His crabby old face seemed to have trouble forcing out this last word. But once he had spoken it, he seemed to accept its reality as he must the changing of summer into autumn. ‘We have the warriors already gathered. And so since we have decided upon this campaign, let us march east with all due speed.’

  Lord Harsha sat rubbing his single eye, then sighed out to Lord Tanu, ‘Well, speed we might all wish for, but an army doesn’t march on air. We’ve made no plans for such a campaign. We’ve set in no stores.’

  ‘How long would it take to gather them?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know – a week, maybe more.’

  ‘And maybe less,’ I told him with a smile, ‘if Lord Harsha was given the charge of gathering them. Do what you can, old friend. As Lord Tanu has said, we must march like the very wind.’

  I stood up then to adjourn our council. Kane took me aside, and growled in my ear, ‘So, we march to Kaash – and Kaash is a hundred leagues that much closer to Galda, eh? Where Morjin still might be!’

  He fell silent as Maram came up to us, too. Then Maram said to me, ‘It’s finally begun, hasn’t it? This is the end, then, the last day of peace I will ever know. Well, Val, then I promise you that I will not fail you and will remain with you until the ugly, bitter end. The very, very end.’

  After that, in the days that followed, there seemed little to do except to go about the countryside buying up beef, pork, barley, wheat, peas and other provender with which to victualize our army. We had to put in whole mountains of hay for all our hundreds of horses, and find wagons to carry this great mass of supplies. Lord Harsha proved as patient and efficient in finding food as he had been in growing it. On the second day, when I saw that he had much more talent for this task than I, I left it all to him. Then I set myself a task which nearly everyone told me would be impossible.

  ‘I would meet the men who pledged to you,’ I told Lord Tomavar. We stood with my other counselors by the side of the square watching hundreds of warriors drilling at their nightly sword practice. ‘And your men, too, Lord Tanu. And yours, Lord Avijan. Every warrior who would march with me, I would learn his name.’

  My father, it was said, had known five thousand warriors by name.

  And so that evening I retreated to my pavilion while Lords Tomavar, Tanu and Avijan – Lords Kharashan, Ramanu and Bahram, as well – set to organizing the fulfillment of my unusual request. The call came for the warriors to line up outside my tent, and this they hastened to do with a great curiosity and rare enthusiasm. I stood inside ten feet back from my tent’s opened flaps as the warriors entered, one by one. The first man
to greet, Yarkash the Bold, hailed from Lashku, and had strongly supported Lord Tomavar until a couple of days before. He was a tall, thickly-muscled knight, with a scar nearly splitting his chin in two. He wore his diamond battle armor, and bore a bright sun emblazoned upon his surcoat. I stood with my sword drawn, and he approached me with quick, sure strides. Then he stopped before me, and with a form that we had arranged, he drew his sword and said to me: ‘Sire, I am Yarkash Jurmanu, son of Suladar Jurmanu. I pledge my sword to you, in life and in death.’

  I pressed my palm to the flat of his blade, and bowed my head in acceptance of his service. And then I said to him: ‘I am Valashu Elahad, son of Shavashar Elahad. And I pledge my sword to you, in life and in death.’

  I held out Alkaladur for him to touch as well. Maram and Master Juwain, looking on, both drew in a quick breath at this, for in all the time that I had kept this sword, I had allowed no one to put his flesh to it – except my enemies, in wounding or death.

  As Yarkash the Bold turned about to exit my tent, another warrior stepped forward. He came up to me and said, ‘Sire, I am Kanshar Sharad, son of Evar Sharad, of Pushku …’

  And so it went. I could spend only a fraction of a minute with each warrior, for there were not enough minutes in a day to allot to each of them, and I had more than fifteen thousand warriors to greet. I stood for hours that night until the muscles in my legs burned with the strain of it. Twice, I broke to drink some tea and take a few moments of rest in my chair at the head of the council table. Then I returned to my new duty, listening to my warriors’ pledges: ‘Sire, I am Juval Eladar …’

  When morning warmed the roof of my tent with a black sheen, I stepped over to the entrance. I looked out to see a glittering line of warriors stretched out down the lanes of the tents of my encampment, across the square and through the lanes of Lord Tomavar’s men’s tents. And then out across the grasses of the meadow beyond. I could not see the end of the line, for it disappeared behind the edge of a low hill.

  At this, I summoned Lord Tomavar and Lord Tanu and said to them, ‘This will not do. All the warriors beyond the square – let them stand down. See to it that they are called up only as the warriors ahead of them finish making their pledges. We have a long day ahead of us.’

  That day was long indeed – one of the longest of my life. And yet its hours did not suffice for me receive all my warriors’ pledges. The sun reached its crest in the cloudy sky at high noon, and then dropped behind the mountains to the west, and still my warriors lined up outside my tent. When it began raining that night – big drops of summer rain that splatted against the earth and thousands of tents with a nearly deafening sound – I considered calling for everyone to break off and take some rest. But Lord Harsha informed me that our army’s provisioning was nearly complete, and I did not want to delay our march. And I would not, I said, march until I heard the names of all my warriors.

  And so the men of Mesh stood in the pouring rain, gaining a few moments of respite only when they stepped dripping inside my tent to face me. Their names seemed to pour from their mouths in an irresistible torrent of sound: ‘Dovaru Elsar, Yulsun of Pushku, Bashar the Brave, Juradan Nolarad …’ I heard no grumbles, even from those who had stood in the rain the longest. The warriors seemed as eager to honor me as I was to honor them.

  ‘It is a great thing that you do,’ Master Juwain said to me as I sat drinking coffee during one of my breaks. ‘But you cannot continue on like this. Already, you have stood here more than a day.’

  ‘These warriors,’ I said to him, ‘will march with me for many days. And then stand in line against our enemies, and many will die. And you say that I cannot continue?’

  Later, long past midnight, I fought to hold myself up straight and keep my eyelids open against the burning dryness there. With every name spoken to me, my sword seemed to flare a little brighter, sending stabs of recognition deep into me. The silver gelstei, Master Juwain had once told me, could quicken all the powers of the mind, especially memory. Although it seemed impossible that I could remember each of my warriors, or even a tenth of them, I had a strange sense that my sword’s silustria was drinking up their names and holding on to them the way it did the stars’ light.

  Late on the afternoon of the following day, with many more men still to greet, a warrior who stood out from all the others came up to me. Indeed, this warrior was no man at all, but rather one of Mesh’s greatest women: for it was Vareva. How she had acquired the suit of diamond armor poorly fitted to her womanly body, I did not know. Perhaps, I thought, she had forced Lord Tomavar to purchase it for her. She wore the two swords that all Valari warriors bore: a bright kalarna and the shorter tharam, which she kept sheathed. I looked long and deeply as she held her kalama out to me and said, ‘Sire, I am Vareva Tomavar, daughter of Manamar Tanu. I pledge my sword to you, in life and in death.’

  ‘And I pledge my sword to you,’ I told her, ‘in life and in death.’

  I saw the warriors behind her staring at her in anger. Then I drew in a deep breath and told her, ‘Many will disapprove of what has just passed between us. They believe that a woman cannot be allowed to be a warrior. But a great man once said this to me: “Does one let the sun shine? No one lets a woman become a warrior.”’

  ‘Then, Sire, I will march with you to the end of –’

  I saw a bright hope come alive in her eyes, but I could not allow it to consume her. And so I held up my hand to silence her. ‘You are what you are, and even your king must respect that. As you must respect your king. Men are only what they are, too, and all those who have stood before you and remain behind you will not bear to see you march with them to war. It is not the Valari way.’

  She bowed her head to me, but then stood up straight and proud as she told me, ‘That has not been our way, Sire, it is true.’

  ‘You cannot change what is,’ I said to her. ‘A man faces battle more bravely for knowing that his woman is safe at home.’

  ‘The warriors’ she informed me, ‘say that no man of Mesh is braver than Valashu Elahad. He, whose woman has fought by his side in many terrible battles across the length and breadth of Ea.’

  I blinked my burning eyes as I looked at this formidable woman. I had to keep a good grip on my sword to stop my legs from trembling, so that I didn’t fall down.

  ‘Atara Ars Narmada,’ I said to her, ‘has vowed to forsake marriage so long as she remains a warrior’

  ‘I, too, would make such a vow, Sire.’

  ‘But that is not our way. That is not how a Valari woman serves her people.’

  ‘How should I serve, then, Sire? By staying in Mesh and bearing Lord Tomavar’s children?’

  ‘A child, from you, would be a great and beautiful thing.’

  ‘Thank you, Sire. But I want nothing more than to put this into Morjin’s filthy creatures, and that would be an even greater thing.’

  So saying, she thrust her sword toward the wall of my tent.

  I shook my head at this. ‘You cannot change the nature of things. When a man dies in battle, a woman might remarry and continue to bear children, and nothing is greater than this life. But when a woman dies, all her children that she might have brought forth die with her as well. And if many women die, her people will die.’

  I hoped that Vareva might see the sense of what I said to her, for I was too tired to argue with her, and many more warriors stood lined up outside my tent. But Vareva, who had often defeated me at riddles and word games when we were children, seemed not very tired at all, and she had the better argument:

  ‘It is not the Valari way, you say, that women should go to war,’ she told me. ‘Or else our people will dwindle and begin to die. But, Sire, this war will be a war to the death for the whole Valari people. I know, for I have heard Morjin himself talk of making whole forests into crosses. If we do not fight this war down to the last breath of every man – and woman – we shall lose. And then the Valari will be no more.’

  I felt her impassioned
breath spilling over my face like fire. I could find no logic to dispute her. And yet I could not, I thought, allow her to march with the army.

  ‘You are a warrior,’ I said to her, ‘and let no one doubt that.’

  I called for Joshu Kadar, one of the knights standing by my side that afternoon, to bring me a wooden box full of rings. I took out one of them – the smallest, set with a single, bright diamond – and I slipped it around Vareva’s finger. She seemed delighted to be honored this way.

  ‘Wear this ring,’ I said to her, ‘that all may recognize a true Valari warrior.’

  Lord Avijan and Lord Jessu – Sar Shivalad and other knights, too, who happened to be present – reluctantly rapped their rings against the hilts of their swords in a great sound that nearly drowned out the patter of the rain. Vareva gazed in wonder at the ring encircling her finger; I sensed that she valued it much more than the diamond brooch over which Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar had nearly gone to war.

  But then her happiness seemed to melt away as I said to her, ‘I cannot take every warrior with me, and so leave Mesh defenseless. Many will remain, and you must be one of them.’

  At this, she had no choice but to bow her head in acceptance of what I had said.

  ‘But I charge you with a task,’ I said to her. ‘Other women feel as you do. Behira Harsha, for one. I fear they will train at arms no matter what their king says. Seek them out, then. Train them as warriors against the day we all fear will come.’

  Vareva looked at me with hope brightening her face again. ‘Thank you, Sire. I shall train a whole battalion of warriors such as the world has never seen!’

  Then she turned about and left my tent, and another warrior came forward to tell me his name. And another, and another after that, and then a thousand others. And so the day passed into yet another night.

  The next morning, to the sound of birds chittering in the meadows, Maram came into my tent. He bulled his way past the warriors lined up at the entrance and indicated that he wished to speak with me. We stepped off into the corner, where he murmured to me: ‘Two full days and one whole night – and here you still are! You cannot continue this way!’