The Diamond Warriors Read online

  Alkaladur, I thought as I pointed it in front of me. The Sword of Fate.

  Although Maram, riding ahead of me, said very little and Kane even less, I knew that we must be close to my wood. We rode through a stand of birch trees that seemed familiar to me. I sensed them from the sound of the wind across their papery bark and by their fermy fragrance. Each kind of tree, I suddenly realized, as with the animals, had its own smell. I knew that the wood of great oaks and elms where Salmelu had fired his poison arrow into me must be close, scarcely a mile from this spot. There, too, the Ahrim had found me and nearly killed me with the even more terrible poison that afflicted my soul.

  ‘We might do best to enter the wood,’ I heard Mararn say to Kane, ‘as we did that day when I went hunting with Val and Asaru. But that would take us past Lord Harsha’s farm, and as badly as I would like to see Behira, I don’t think it would serve for her to see Val in such a state.’

  We paused then, and I heard the horses of the Seven and my friends come up behind me. I heard them gathering in together, and I had to suppose that no one had lagged behind. I found myself able to pick up the little boy smell of Daj and Estrella’s sweeter scent, as well as the rosewater perfume that Liljana often wore. But I was a man, and not a hound, and whether or not Abrasax and Master Storr and the others had kept pace with us, I could not say – at least until their voices announced their presence.

  ‘I remember that day,’ Joshu Kadar said to Maram from out of the darkness behind me. ‘I waited for hours at the edge of the wood by Lord Harsha’s farm while you went after your deer. But surely we could enter it from a different direction.’

  ‘Surely we could,’ I said, pointing my sword to the right of the birch trees. My sense of direction burned like an arrow through my blood as strong as ever. ‘If we go straight that way, we will come to the place where the Ahrim attacked me.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maram said to me, ‘I still can’t see how it will avail us to go back there!

  ‘I can’t either, Maram,’ I told him. ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘But what if the Ahrim only draws more power from that dark, damned wood? What if it finds a way to blind the rest of us?’

  The radiance sparking off my sword seemed to pull me forward as might the twinkling of the North Star. And I said to Maram, ‘I can find my own way from here, if I must. I would ask no one to come with me.’

  ‘Ah, well, you might not ask it then. But what kind of a man would let his friend go stumbling off blindly through the trees?’

  And then Joshu Kadar said to me: ‘I have pledged my sword to you, in life and in death, Sire. Please let there be no more talk of you going on alone.’

  I smiled at this, then nodded my head to Kane that we should continue.

  As we left the road and entered the forest, we moved more slowly, letting the horses pick their way through the bracken. I left it to Kane to determine if we should dismount and walk, should the undergrowth become too thick or the downed, dead trees threaten to break the horses’ legs. But all of our horses, I thought, had become used to journeys through the forest. So had I. It seemed to me that I had spent nearly my entire youth walking through this one, or others. I could not see the tall oaks, elms, maples and chestnuts that I knew lay beyond the birch grove. I could not make out their two stories, dark lower down and a lighter green where their leaves bushed up against the sky. But I could almost feel their hugeness and the great streams of life that coursed through them. I could smell the humus of the forest floor and bear droppings full of raspberry seeds and many flowers. Bees buzzed from some honeysuckle hanging on a tree nearby, and I heard a woodpecker knocking its needle-like bill into the bark of another farther away. All my senses, save my sight, seemed to have come fully alive here.

  As Kane led on, taking his bearings from the direction in which I pointed my sword, I perceived Alkaladur’s blade gradually warming to a brighter silver. It almost drove back the blackness clinging to the trees and holding fast about my head.

  ‘I think we are close,’ I heard Maram say to Kane, and me. ‘It can’t be much farther – maybe just past that rotting log.’

  Behind me, I heard Liljana murmur soft reassurances to the children, and behind them, Abrasax announced that the trees here exuded a more powerful aura than those of any he had ever encountered. And then, fifty yards farther on, I heard Maram call for a halt.

  ‘There’s something strange here,’ he said.

  I, too, felt what he felt, and perhaps even more strongly. The air suddenly grew denser and moister, and seemed to waver with a charge as if lightning might strike out at any moment.

  ‘Val – I feel sick to my stomach. It’s as if a fist is driving into me and keeping me back.’

  As it turned it out, when we gathered in close to discuss things, we all felt a deep and silent force working at our bodies and souls like an ocean’s tide pushing us back the way we had come.

  ‘It was this way,’ Master Juwain said, ‘with the Vilds.’

  I remembered vividly the three magic woods that we had found in Ea’s wild places: in the great tract of the Alonian forest and on the grasslands of the Wendrush and in the burning waste of the Red Desert. It did not seem possible that another Vild could exist in the middle of Mesh, surrounded by farms and men who had hunted all through these woods many thousands of times over thousands of years.

  ‘Kane,’ I called out, ‘you once said that at least five Vilds still remained somewhere on Ea. Can one of them be here?’

  ‘Not that I know,’ he said with a strange tightness in his voice. ‘At least, not that I remember’

  I could almost hear Master Juwain rubbing the back of his bald head in intense cogitation. He suddenly said to me, ‘In the three Vilds, we have found great power and great healing. Perhaps, in your forays here, you sensed the presence of a Vild within this wood, even if you were never aware of it. And have now sought it in your blindness.’

  His thoughts, it seemed, almost exactly mirrored my own.

  ‘Let us go on then,’ I said. ‘Into that very place where it seems the hardest to go.’

  The silver streak of my sword pointed us deeper into the woods. More than once, the force pushing at us almost caused me to turn my sword to one side or the other, or lower it altogether. But I kept a hold of it, and we continued moving through the great, silent trees.

  ‘Do you see anything?’ I heard Maram say to Kane. ‘Does anyone see anything? There are only trees here, just as there always were, and one tree is like another!’

  I smiled at this, for not even two oaks that grew from a pair of acorns would be like each other – to say nothing of the immense oaks of Ea’s Vilds that were like no other trees on earth. I felt sure that we must be close to these living giants that grew out of the forest floor. I wondered why no one seemed able to make them out.

  ‘Wait!’ Maram shouted. ‘There is something ahead of us – I can almost see it!’

  I, however, could could not. Trapped within a cloud of blackness as I was, I wondered at the nature of sight, itself. How did anyone, or anything, really see? Vision could not merely be a matter of light filling up the eyes with colors and shapes, or else my eyes would behold a sea of green all around me. When my grandfather had taken me hunting as a young boy, he had taught me how to look for fire moth caterpillars, whose form and hue exactly matched that of the twigs they hid among. Detecting them, he had told me, required patience, concentration and a training of the mind behind the eye. Had it been this way for Atara, too, searching among millions of possible futures for the one that might hold life for the earth?

  True seeing, I thought, could not be possible without a will to see. One must learn to look behind surfaces and the usual expectation and habits of the eye and mind. There must be a sensitivity to nuance, a drive toward something higher and deeper, the sudden perceiving of things in a new light – and a sort of astonished touching of the real. To see the unseen required a freshness of the mind and a cleanness of the spirit. And seeing, a
s my grandfather had told me, was much of what the One had created us to do. What did the One will us behold? Above all, the infinite depths and delights of the One’s creation and the immense glory of life that filled even the tiniest of seeds as they sent up through the earth green shoots that fought their way higher and ever higher toward that brilliant and beautiful star in the sky that men had named the …’

  ‘Maram!’ I heard Kane shout out from ahead of me. ‘Can you see me? Can you hear me?’

  With the breaking of Kane’s voice into the peace of the woods, the darkness suddenly lifted from me. It was as if the door to a dungeon had been flung open: I blinked against the burning stabs of light that drove into my eyes. It took me many moments before everything began to clear. Then I gasped in awe to see that we had somehow left the wood to find ourselves in a grove like unto no other that I had ever seen. The trees around us, with their silver bark and golden leaves, all were astors but much taller and more magnificent than their cousins in Ea’s other Vilds. They grew not like the trees of most woods, crowded together crown to crown, but rather spaced apart allowing a clear sight of the blue, sun-filled sky. Few bushes spread out above the forest floor, carpeted with old leaves and patches of grass, but flowers grew everywhere.

  ‘Maram!’ Kane called out once more. And then: ‘Liljana! Daj! Master Juwain!’

  I whipped about in my saddle, looking around me. I could see none of our friends whom Kane had named, nor Joshu Kadar, Master Matai, Master Nolashar, Master Yasul or Master Storr. Of the Seven, only Master Virang and Abrasax himself seemed to have found their way into this new place. As had Bemossed and Estrella, but no one else.

  Or so I thought until I saw Alphanderry suddenly take form to stand in a spray of crimson flowers almost as bright as his mysterious being, which seemed somehow much more luminous and real than it had ever been before.

  Kane saw me looking about, and called to me: ‘You can see again!’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘the Ahrim left me suddenly. I think it is gone.’

  I cast about trying to sense it, perhaps hiding in the lee of one of the great trees. But the brightness of this wood made even shadow seem light.

  ‘But what happened?’ I said to Kane. ‘Where are the others?’

  Beneath the silvery bough of one the astors high above us, we gathered to hold council: Kane, Abrasax, Master Virang, Bemossed, Alphanderry and myself. And Estrella. Although our passage into these wondrous trees had not cured her of her muteness, she could say more with a smile and a brightening of her eyes than most people could with a whole stream of words.

  ‘So, this happened,’ Kane said. ‘I was looking for the Vild, and suddenly found myself within it.’

  ‘So it was with me,’ Abrasax said. The intense sunlight seemed to set his white hair and beard on fire. ‘I was looking, as a Master Reader is trained to look. There should be an aura to any Vild, different from other woods. And then, of a moment, instead of the wood where the Ahrim attacked Val, I saw this’.

  Off through the silver and golden shimmer of astor trees, I noticed gardens of emeralds and diamonds that the Vild’s people cultivated, along with dozens of other gems and even gelstei themselves. Birds as bright as parrots flew from tree to tree. Timpum – in all their swirling, scintillating, many-colored millions – hung about nearly every branch, twig and leaf. Never had I seen these luminous beings blaze so brilliantly

  It turned out that all of us had experienced a sort of ripping away of our bodies and souls to find ourselves suddenly riding our horses through this glorious wood. Even Kane, who must have experienced almost everything that could be experienced, seemed distressed. Estrella, however, simply gazed up in wonder above the trees at the fiery red sun. She evinced no fear at how she had come to be in this place; in truth, she seemed utterly at home here, as in some strange way she did everywhere.

  It was Bemossed who asked the questions that pressed most keenly on all our minds: ‘But where are the others, then? Did they remain behind? And if so, why?’

  At this, Kane shrugged his shoulders then scowled at the sky. Not even Grandmaster Abrasax, wise in all lore, had an answer for him.

  ‘And if they did make their way here,’ Bemossed continued, ‘is it possible that they came out into a different part of this wood?’

  No one knew. The Vild seemed to spread out for miles around us in all directions. So open were the spaces between the giant trees that one could say that no path led through them – or that a thousand did.

  ‘We must search for our friends then,’ I said. I turned toward Kane. ‘You have the most woodcraft, and so it might be best if you …’

  I did not finish my sentence. For at that moment, from behind a tree nearby, a small, muscular man stepped out to greet us. He had the leaf-green eyes and curly hair of many of his people, whom I had first known as the Lokilani and Kane called by their more ancient name: the Lokii. He wore an emerald necklace which hung down upon his brown-skinned chest and a skirt woven of some kind of gleaming fiber, but nothing else. I expected him to speak with that strange lilt to his words, as had the other Lokii in the other Vilds. Instead he addressed us in an almost formal manner, as might an envoy sent from a great king.

  ‘Valashu Elahad,’ he said, stepping closer, ‘you have come here again – and now as King Valamesh. Allow me to present myself: my name is Aukai.’

  Although he did not bow to me, for such was not the Lokii’s way, he might as well have. I dismounted then, and so did the others. And I said to Aukai with astonishment: ‘But how do you know who I am? For I never have come here before.’

  At this, he just smiled. And then his hand swept out, pointing through the trees as he said, ‘There is a forest beyond here that the Forest sometimes touches upon. You have come there, three times now, at least, for that is your fate. As you have come here.’

  ‘But how do you know this, then?’

  ‘I know because I know. And because it was foretold.’

  ‘Foretold by whom?’

  Aukai looked from Abrasax to Master Virang, and then at Bemossed before his gaze finally settled on Kane. And he said to me, ‘The messenger told of your coming, Valashu Elahad.’

  ‘And what messenger is this?’

  ‘Her name is Ondin.’ He paused as he looked at me more deeply. ‘She is of the El Alajin.’

  ‘One of the Elijin, here,’ I said. ‘But they are not permitted to come to Ea!’

  Aukai used his bare toe to dig at the golden leaves spread out over the earth. And he said to me, ‘But you do not now stand on Ea.’

  At this, I looked up at the sun, almost as deeply red as a ruby. And I said to Aukai, ‘But where do we stand, then?’

  ‘In the Forest, of course.’

  ‘Yes – but where is the Forest?’

  In the third Vild, I had fallen into a magic pool only to emerge dripping wet upon the Star People’s world of Givene. I wondered if once again I had made a passage to the stars.

  ‘The Forest,’ Aukai said to me, ‘is where it is. Sometimes it is one place, and sometimes another. But always it is where one wills it to be.’

  Abrasax, I noticed, paid keen attention to Aukai’s words, and so did Master Virang. Bemossed, though, looked up at the sun. To my amazement, it now shone as yellow-golden as the sun I had known all my life.

  ‘I am sorry’ Aukai said to me, ‘I have confused you, and I did not mean to. But some things are hard to explain. Let me try again.’

  He drew in a breath of the wood’s bracing air as he watched Estrella touching a small, five-pointed flower. Its white petals radiated a soft white light, and we would later learn that the Lokii named this wonder as a stellular.

  ‘In truth,’ Aukai told us, ‘it might be most accurate to say that the Forest always just is. And it always is upon the world you call Ea. But it also exists upon Lahale, where the El Alajin dwell’

  He paused to let us consider what he had said. Kane, I saw, stared at Aukai so intently that I could feel the ra
w, red hammering of his heart.

  And then Master Virang asked the question that anyone, and not just a Master of the Brotherhood, would wonder at: ‘But how can your wood be two places at once?’

  ‘In the same way that your thoughts can dwell with two things at once,’ Aukai told him. ‘And your awareness, and your will. Above all, your will to be aware. That was how all of you found your way here.’

  He told us that the attainment of a certain awareness would allow one to perceive the Forest and enter it. In a way, one called the Forest into the world and ‘set’ it either on Ea or Lahale.

  ‘Then would it be possible,’ Master Virang asked, his almond eyes sparkling, ‘for one of us to set the Forest on Lahale and walk out onto the world of the Elijin?’

  Aukai looked at Kane for a moment before he said, ‘It would be possible – someday, perhaps, if a man attained the awareness of the Immortal Ones. But not I, nor my people. Nor you, I think.’

  ‘I think not, too,’ Master Virang said sadly. ‘But clearly the Elijin whom you call Ondin can set the Forest on Lahale. Can all of their order?’

  ‘All who wish to. But why should they come to our Forest, or call it to them, when theirs is even brighter and spreads out across almost their whole world?’

  ‘Why, indeed,’ Master Virang said as he watched the light of the stellular fill up Estrella’s hand with its warm sheen. And then he asked: ‘But if the people of Ea cannot pass to Lahale, can the Elijin pass to Ea?’

  ‘Some can. But it is difficult.’ Aukai sighed as he seemed to look through the trees for the wood in which the Ahrirn had attacked me. ‘To set the Forest on Ea requires entering into a lower awareness, and only some of the El Alajin are willing to put themselves in such jeopardy. And even those the Shining Ones have forbidden to walk upon Ea.’

  I thought of my friends, whom I feared we had left behind, on Ea. I asked Aukai about this.

  ‘They have not entered the Forest, that I know,’ Aukai said. ‘I do not think they will. It was foretold that seven of you would come, and seven of you are here.’