The Diamond Warriors Page 24

‘None could.’ Ondin said, with even greater sadness. ‘Just as you have not yet learned to wield the sword you hold in your hands.’

  I raised up my silver sword a little higher. And I said, ‘But what does this have to do with that?’

  ‘No one knows. Perhaps no one.’ Ondin turned to look at Kane. ‘You forged Valashu’s sword and gave it its name. Why did you call it Alkaladur?’

  For a long moment, Kane stood in a cold silence staring at me and what I held in my hands. Then he snapped at Ondin, ‘So, it’s a sword, of silustria, most luminous of all substances – as the true Alkaladur was to be a sword of light. What else should I have called it, eh?’

  ‘You make a mystery out of your creation,’ Ondin told him.

  ‘So what if I do, then? Creation, itself, is mysterious, eh?’

  Ondin gazed at him, then finally turned away to touch her finger to my sword’s blade. She said to me, ‘Ashtoreth sent me to tell you that this must somehow be used in the battle against Angra Mainyu and Morjin.’

  She lifted her hand away from my sword and set it down upon my tunic over my heart. ‘And this. And you must find the way to use them.’

  ‘But I do not know how!’

  ‘You said that, too, when you were a boy learning the songs I taught you. You will learn how.’

  ‘But who will be my teacher then? Will you leave the Forest and remain on Ea?’

  ‘No, Valashu – you know I cannot’ She looked at Bemossed. ‘But you will have the greatest of teachers. You will come into your power when the Maitreya comes into his.’

  I gripped my hands more tightly around Alkaladur’s hilt; I could almost feel the sun’s light coursing through it.

  ‘You will face Morjin, soon,’ she told me. ‘And then, if you are a warrior of the spirit and a true king, you will find a way to forgive him. You must desire his healing and only good for him – even his happiness. And in the end, with all your heart, you must find a way to –’

  ‘No!’ I cried out. ‘I will slay Morjin, for that is my fate!’

  ‘But Valashu, you cannot know –’

  ‘I do know!’ I shouted at her. ‘Ashtoreth and all the Galadin, and you, yourself, might be capable of finding inside such a benevolent and selfless soul force. But I am not so noble!’

  ‘You are –’

  ‘I am not the one who can do this thing!’ I shouted at her.

  Her face grew stern as she looked at me. ‘You are King Valamesh.’

  I pointed my bright blade straight toward the heart of the sun. ‘Yes, I am now King of Mesh – and this is my sword. And Morjin is my enemy.’

  Ondin just smiled at this, with an immense sadness that flooded over me like the tide of the sea. Then she said to me, ‘You are right: that is your sword. And its inscription was graven there for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, angling the sword slightly so that the light played over the silver blade. Its surface gleamed as unmarked as the most perfect of mirrors. ‘Alkaladur bears no inscription!’

  ‘Does it not?’

  I gazed more deeply at my sword. ‘If it does, then time has worn it away.’

  ‘From silustria, Valashu?’

  My sword’s silustria, I knew, was so hard that not even thousands of years of its immersion in the sea had left the slightest mark upon it.

  ‘But what is inscribed there?’ I asked her.

  ‘I do not know what is inscribed there. Only that it is inscribed there.’

  ‘Inscribed how, then? I can see nothing.’

  ‘No? Can you not? Then look, Valashu!’

  Kane, three paces from me, stood still as a mountain as he gazed at my sword.

  Then I looked, too. I looked at the smooth, shining silustria with a will to see behind its surface and the habits of my eye and mind. I must, I thought, let the whole of my awareness blaze forth. I must drive myself to perceive something deeper within the silver gelstei and to grasp it with all the force of my soul in a sort of astonished touching of …

  ‘It flares!’ I cried out. ‘The letters – they flare!’

  From within the sword’s bright surface near the hilt, curved glyphs suddenly leaped out from the silustria with an even brighter light. They formed and flared like etchings made from a silvery flame: Vas Sama Yeos Valarda …’

  Abrasax, almost without thought, translated these words from the ancient Ardik:

  With his eye of compassion

  He saw his enemy

  Like unto himself

  As he spoke, I studied the luminous glyphs graven into my sword near the hilt – but leaving the patch of silustria nearest it unmarked.

  Then Ondin said to me, ‘With your eye, Valashu. Look! There is more to the inscription.’

  I looked at my bright sword with all the power I could find within myself to look. But the patch of silustria beneath the inscription remained as smooth as glass.

  ‘I cannot see anything else!’ I said. ‘What are the lines, then?’

  ‘I cannot tell you. It is known only that the sword’s maker inscribed six lines.’

  Here she turned toward Kane and asked him, ‘Can you tell us what they are?’

  Kane shifted his attention from my sword to Ondin, and gazed at her with a fierce, deep longing. He seemed to fight back tears with a terrible savagery toward himself. I sensed in him, however, no desire for her, as a man desires a woman, but only the keenest of urges to behold her as she truly was and to embrace that luminous part of her hidden so deeply from his sight.

  ‘So, I cannot tell you,’ he finally said. ‘I have forgotten them.’

  Ondin nodded at Anouhe, still holding the cup of green liquor. ‘Then perhaps you should drink from her cup.’

  I felt something flash inside Kane, and I feared that he might strike out at Ondin. Instead, in a voice both gentle and anguished, he said, ‘No – it would not help.’

  Ondin took a step closer to him, and with a sad smile, touched his face. I stared at the two of them in amazement. I had never seen Kane let anyone make free with his person or tender him this sort of kindness.

  ‘Someday,’ she told him, ‘you will remember.’

  Then she withdrew her hand and looked back at me. She tapped her finger just above the hilt of my sword. ‘Just as you will find the last three lines inside yourself, and then see them written here.’

  She drew in a long breath of the glade’s flower-scented air. ‘The time is coming, Valashu. Ashtoreth bids me to tell you that just as Angra Mainyu has sent the dark thing to attack you, the Ieldra will shower upon Ea their blessed light.’

  Abrasax, who seemed as well-schooled in astrology as the Brotherhood’s Master Diviner, pointed up into the sky to the left of the sun. ‘The Golden Band still strengthens. Never have I seen it flare so.’

  To most people, most of the time, the radiance that the Ieldra sent out to all worlds of the universe remained invisible. Now, however, Abrasax aimed his finger at a patch of cloudless sky far beyond which lay Ninsun at the center of all things. And suddenly, I thought, I beheld what he did: the sky’s blueness seemed to break open to reveal the deeper color behind. It was glorre, the one color that possessed the qualities and attributes of all the others while shimmering with its own marvelous and unique splendor.

  Without knowing why I did what I did, I raised up Alkaladur straight toward this band of glorre. My sword’s silustria grew almost clear then. It seemed to draw down the onstreaming glorre and drink it in. And then, as with the flash of lightning, my sword showered out a brilliance of this color. Its radiance fell upon all of us, and brought a gleam to our eyes and hope to our hearts.

  To Alphanderry, it brought much more. We all watched in wonder as he stood near my glistering sword as beneath a waterfall. He raised back his head and opened his mouth as if he wanted to let the Ieldra’s light run down his throat deep into his being. His hands closed about the glorre-filled air, almost as might a real hand of flesh and blood. At last, I lowered my sword, and the glade return
ed its more usual hues of silver, gold and green. But Alphanderry did not return to the same substance he had been. He laid his hand on top of my hand, and the warmth of his skin burned me; I felt hard bones beneath, and the blood of life streaming through him all warm and good, and I shook my head in astonishment because I knew that somehow he had been made again as real as any other man.

  ‘It is a miracle,’ Bemossed said, putting his hand to Alphanderry’s wrist. ‘A true miracle – and not the kind that men say I make.’

  ‘As it has been promised, Minstrel,’ Ondin said to Alphanderry, ‘you have been restored to yourself.’

  Alphanderry – and all of us – bowed our heads in awe.

  Then Kane, his eyes filling with tears, moved over to Alphanderry and embraced him. His hands thumped with great force and sound against Alphanderry’s back as he cried out: ‘My little friend, my little friend! Ha – you are alive!’

  Thus did Alphanderry, killed in the pass of the Kul Moroth, rejoin his companions of old, and both Kane and I wept without restraint.

  Then Ondin told us that her work here had been completed and that she must go. ‘And you must, too,’ she said to me.

  I knew that I must. I asked her, ‘But what of the Ahrim, then? It will be waiting for me when I leave these woods, won’t it?’

  Ondin nodded her head at this. ‘It will always be waiting for you, Valashu. Just as we will be waiting for you to defeat it, once and for all.’

  We both looked at the flaming inscription sealed into my sword’s silustria. Then she smiled at me and added, ‘Farewell, mighty King. Until we meet again.’

  Without another word she inclined her head as if to bid us all goodbye. Then she turned and walked from the glade as she had come.

  Kane, now exultant, moved over to his horse, where he retrieved the mandolet that he had inherited from Alphanderry. He gave it into Alphanderry’s hands and said, ‘Now you can play this again!’

  And play Alphanderry did. For the rest of that morning, as we took one last meal with Anouhe, Aukai and a few other of the Lokii, Alphanderry plucked the strings of his mandolet as he sang out in his poignant, beautiful voice the very lyrics which had brought down the wrath of Morjin’s men in the Kul Moroth: La valaha eshama halla, lais arda alhalla …

  Now it brought only smiles to our faces.

  12

  It proved less difficult to leave the Lokii’s Forest than it had been to enter it. The seven of us came out into the woods where we had left our companions – but a quarter mile farther to the east. We heard Mararn and the others shouting for us through the oaks and maples. We shouted back at them, and soon met up near a great silver maple tree.

  ‘What happened?’ Maram bellowed out to us. ‘One moment, we were all riding along together, and then the next …’

  His voice died off into the twitterings of the birds as he gazed at me. ‘Val! You can see again!’

  As I sat on top of my horse beneath the maple’s pointed and shining leaves, I could see perfectly Maram’s heavily bearded face, happy with relief. Through the greenery of the trees, I could make out some red clusters of sumac nearly a hundred yards away. I could not, however, detect any sign of the Ahrim.

  ‘Then you are free,’ he said, ‘and you …’

  Again, Maram stopped speaking as he looked at Alphanderry sitting on top of his horse as he plucked at his shiny mandolet. And then Maram shouted, ‘Alphanderry! Is it really you? What happened?’

  Abrasax took charge of giving an account of how we had come to enter the Lokii’s wood and our meeting with Ondin. Maram – along with Master Juwain, Liljana, Daj and Joshu Kadar – listened in wonderment to his words.

  ‘Strange,’ Master Juwain said, pulling at his ruined ear. ‘Everything you have told us, so strange. And strangest of all, perhaps, is this matter of time. It seems that you spent nearly a whole day with the Lokilani, but to us, you went missing only moments ago.’

  He had no explanation for this mystery, nor did Abrasax, Master Virang or any of us. But Daj seemed more interested in something else. He said to us, ‘Each of the Vilds seems larger on the inside than the outside, in whatever part of the world we have found them – but how can that be?’

  No one could explain this, either. And no one wanted to venture a guess as to how we seven had entered the Vild while our other companions had been left behind. Liljana, however, saved the better part of her amazement for the miracle of Alphanderry’s return. She nudged her horse up to his, and leaned over and planted a loud, smacking kiss on his cheek. ‘You are as alive as you ever were, and who knew that the Ieldra had such power? But, since you do live and breathe, you’ll soon be hungry again, just like any other man. So why don’t we leave these woods and find a place where I can cook you a good meal?’

  On our way back to the army’s encampment, that evening and part of the next day, Liljana had more than one chance to prepare sustaining foods and serve Alphanderry once again. We rode back across the middle of Mesh, down the North Road and through Hardu, crossing the Arashar River in midafternoon. I looked for the Ahrim through wood and glen and along the roadside for every mile of our journey. Although I could find no sign of it, I felt its presence lurking behind nearly every tree, bush and farmhouse.

  Our entrance into the camp created a stir. A rumor, it seemed, had circulated among my army that I had been stricken blind. As I rode down the lanes of tents toward my billowing, black pavilion, I did my best to dispel it. Warriors in their thousands lined my way to greet me; I met eyes with as many of them as I could, and I called out hundreds of names: ‘Ramaru of Ki; Barshan Nolaru; Skymar Yuval; Juladan the Bold …’ I knew then, to my amazement, that I had not stood inside my tent for days greeting these men in vain. They now greeted me in high spirits, and I guessed that they would pass around a new rumor: that my quest for a vision had been successful, and soon I would lead them out of Mesh to war.

  We marched at dawn on the 26th of Soldru, a day of intense sunshine and bright, blue skies. The captains of my army – Lord Tanu, Lord Tomavar, Lord Sharad and Lord Avijan – gave me a report of our numbers: ten thousand and eighty-nine men. Although more than fifteen thousand had stood for me in our encampment’s square, I had to leave many behind for Mesh’s defense. And many warriors were too old or too crippled with old wounds, taken at the Culhadosh Commons and at other battles, to set out with us. It was a smaller army than most that my father had fielded. I thought, however, that we would fight just as well, and perhaps even better, since we would be contending not just for our own lives but those of our people – and perhaps everyone in the world.

  I led forth, with Joshu Kadar riding beside me and holding the Elahad banner, with its silver swan and stars. Lord Avijan’s companies of knights formed my vanguard, nearly four hundred strong; their gleaming shields showed blue bulls and golden eagles and hundreds of other charges against fields of white, black or red. I assigned Lord Sharad’s three hundred cavalry to guard our rear. They would have a boring, dusty duty of looking after the many wagons in our vulnerable baggage train – more wagons than I would have guessed that Lord Harsha could have assembled and filled with supplies considering the short notice that I had given him. Between the train and the vanguard marched the Meshian foot: more than nine thousand warriors clad in brilliant diamond armor. With each step, the jangling of the silver bells fastened around their ankles rang out in a great, nerve-piercing sound. Lord Tanu commanded seven battalions of them, and Lord Tomavar likewise. Although Lord Avijan still mistrusted Lord Tomavar, and had argued against giving him such an important command, I kept faith with my father’s judgment in this. As much as possible, I wished to preserve the order of battle that had led us to victory at the Culhadosh Commons.

  Maram and Kane, of course, rode with me in the van, while Master Juwain and Liljana kept pace with Abrasax and the other Masters of the Brotherhood farther back. It seemed odd that they should accompany us on our way to battle. But I could not bear to leave Bemossed ill-guarded in M
esh, and where the Maitreya went, they would go as well. I told myself that each of the Seven possessed skills that we might need – if only I could prevail upon these willful old men to employ them in my service. One last time, I tried to persuade Daj and Estrella that they would both be better off taking up residence at Lord Harsha’s farm with Behira. But they persuaded me – with the sheer, soaring force of their spirits – that they must follow me to the end of our road. They feared their own deaths, I thought, much less than I did. In the end, king or no, I had to relent. I knew the limits of my power.

  Our route took us back through Hardu, and then down the North Road (here called the South Road) through Godhra. In this city of smithies, the smoke from thousands of coal fires filled the air and stung our eyes. Many people turned out to watch us march past. They cast roses upon the warriors and shouted out their blessings. It seemed that all of Mesh now knew what we intended to accomplish, and why.

  It was fifty miles, altogether, down the good road from Hardu to the Sky Pass in Mesh’s southernmost mountain range. We made this distance in three days; I might have pressed my army to even greater speed, but I did not want to tire my men too sorely at the very beginning of our campaign. Then, too, the road from Godhra climbed steeply up to the pass, and with the wagons full of stores and creaking slowly along, the oxen had a long, hard work of pulling them. No other way out of Mesh took a traveler up so high. By the time we reached the great stone kel keep guarding it, the terrain about us was all barren tundra, ice, rocks and snow. Some clouds formed up, and it rained upon us: icy pellets of water that caused ten thousand men to wrap themselves tightly in their cloaks. We were all glad, I thought, after we had descended the pass and came out into the broader – and drier – valley below. But there, at the end of the valley, where the foothills gave way to the rolling grasslands of the Wendrush, we found ourselves at the very edge of the country claimed by the Sarni’s Mansurii tribe: one of Mesh’s oldest and fiercest enemies.

  We made camp with the mountains to our backs on this foreign soil. I ordered our rows of tents to be surrounded by a moat and earthen stockade. My warriors had a bitterly hard time employing picks and shovels to break through the steppe’s tough sod to the black earth beneath. But I would not needlessly expose my army to attack by the Mansurii’s horse archers. On another campaign across the Wendrush, two years before, I had discovered just how vulnerable even the best knights in the world could be to armor-piercing arrows fired at a distance by the galloping Sarni. In truth, I knew I took a great chance in leading my men through this land. But only one other route led to Kaash, and that would have taken us through Waas.