The Diamond Warriors Read online

  The next four days we spent in our rush to the sea. Urgency drove us to pound forth over rocky roads and fairly swim our way through slips of mud and around bogs. Twelve wagons suffered broken wheels or axles, and we had to abandon them. And my men truly suffered, mostly from cramping muscles, shin splints and bleeding feet; no matter how hard they might be, men were still made of flesh that could too easily be exhausted, broken or worn by wet boots right off their bones. Forty-six warriors had to fall out of their columns on the third day of our march, and by the fifth day, another hundred and twenty. I could not, however, simply abandon them. We cleared out stores from another two dozen wagons, inside of which the wounded rested and waited for Master Juwain and our other healers to attend them. It was a measure of my warriors’ spirits, I thought, that to a man they pleaded with Master Juwain to make them whole and ready for the day of battle.

  On the 11th of Soal, I sent outriders to the east to scout the countryside ahead of us, all the way to the sea. That night, as we made camp in a valley full of walnut orchards and potato farms, one of these riders returned with good news – and bad.

  ‘Sire,’ a young knight named Sar Galajay said to me in the relative quiet of my tent, ‘the sea is close: less than half a day’s march from here. We found the place called the Seredun Sands and the Pillars of Heaven. And great rocks they are, black as coal and rising two hundred feet above the beach. Such white sands! I’ve never seen their like! It is a perfect place for a battle! The beach is half a mile wide and stretches north and south for as far as the eye can see. Three hills block the way to it. If we are careful, they will cover our approach. The enemy would have no sight of us, only …’

  His voice died into the crackling of many fires and the other sounds of our encampment. I waited for him to go on, and he added, ‘Only, there is no enemy! Nothing but empty sands and the wind blowing them into little mounds like sugar.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to him, nodding my head. I tried to fight down my great disappointment and make good of his news. ‘Then the hardships of our march have not been in vain. Surely our enemy will make landfall tomorrow or on the day after that.’

  Sar Galajay did not gainsay my optimistic words or point out that Master Matai might have been wrong and our enemy might land far to the north or south of the Seredun Sands – or indeed, might have come ashore already. While Lords Sharad, Tanu, Harsha and Tomavar looked on, Sar Galajay tried to pick up on my forced high spirits, saying to me, ‘We are hoping you are right, Sire. Sar Siravay and Sar Torald remain in the hills above the beach, watching for our enemy’s approach.’

  Later that night, I stood around a fire with Kane and Bemossed, and others, listening to Alphanderry sing. He gave the warriors verses from an ancient epic to inspirit them and ignite their valor. He praised the warriors’ true essence, which shone the same in all men and women, as it did within the One, and could never be extinguished:

  Who takes up sword to rend and slay,

  Cut men from life like sheaves of hay?

  To feel, in blood, the noblest need,

  With honor do the dreadful deed?

  ’Tis evil killing men in war,

  Reduce their dreams to pain and gore,

  But worse to suffer evil kings

  To make free men their underlings.

  They truly live, thus they are free

  Who know their immortality;

  The soul abides, its sacred light

  Shines on through death forever bright.

  Brave warriors neither fear nor mourn:

  The blessed flame is never born,

  Within its blaze all living lies,

  It always is and never dies.

  No sword nor axe nor lance nor mace

  Can violate the soul’s true face,

  No dart can pierce nor knife nor spear,

  So fight, with honor, do not fear…

  I had never heard Alphanderry sing so powerfully before. His voice seemed to call down the very fire of the stars. When he had finished and put away his mandolet, Bemossed stood in deep contemplation, staring at him. And then he finally murmured to me: ‘Do you really think there will be a battle, Valashu?’

  ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I do.’

  Kane’s savage face gleamed in the firelight as he turned toward the east and sniffed the air. ‘So, there will be – I can smell it coming, even as I can the sea.’

  My senses were not so keen as his, nor were Bemossed’s. But he possessed an exquisite sensitivity to life that Kane seemed to lack. He looked for Kane through the night’s gloom, and he asked him, ‘Are you not afraid then?’

  ‘Have you listened to none of Alphanderry’s song?’ Kane replied. ‘Ha, afraid! – of what, then? Death?’

  ‘No – of living. At having to survive yet another battle.’

  ‘Ha!’ Kane growled out again. ‘You might as well ask an old wolf if he fears killing and filling his belly with good meat and his blood with new life so that he can run across the snow all night and then stand howling at the splendor of the moon!’

  Even as he spoke these words, his eyes filled with deep lights, and he gazed out at the disc of silver rising above the wooded hills in the eastern sky. I wondered if this same bright orb shone down upon a fleet of ships sailing at this moment straight toward us.

  ‘Your way’ Bemossed said to him, ‘is war, while mine must be of peace.’

  ‘What peace, then?’

  ‘The peace of the One. The stillness of the moon and stars that we must learn to bring to men, here on earth.’ He turned toward me to meet my gaze. I had never seen a man who seemed so tired or old deep inside his soul – in some ways, older even than Kane. ‘Valashu, is there no way to stop this battle?’

  I thought of Morjin and how he had clawed his fingers into Atara’s eyes; I thought of my mother and grandmother nailed to wooden planks, and of my brothers who had been speared and cleaved upon the Culhadosh Commons. Then I said to Bemossed, ‘Only if my heart can be stopped from beating.’

  ‘But what if you gain the advantage over the Galdans and the Karabukers, forcing them into a bad position as you did King Sandarkan? Could you not force them to surrender?’

  ‘Our enemy’s army’ I told him, ‘is ten times the size of ours. With such numbers, they will never surrender’

  ‘You do not know that.’

  ‘I do know,’ I told him. ‘If King Mansul surrendered to such a force of Valari, Morjin would crucify him’.

  ‘But what if you could persuade the Karabukers and Galdans to change sides? And so add another 150,000 men to your army?’

  ‘The Dragon’s soldiers, changing sides!’ I cried out. ‘Impossible!’

  Bemossed moved a step closer to me, and I could almost feel his soft breath falling over my face. Something vast and irresistible moved within him then, and the force of his words struck me like a whirlwind: ‘Nothing is impossible, King Valamesh. There must be a way – how often have you, yourself, said this?’

  There must be a way to end war, I told myself for the ten thousandth time. But how?

  As I gazed at Bemossed, the tiredness seemed to leave him, and he smiled at me. His face seemed even brighter than the moon. In that moment, I wanted to believe that all things were possible. But then I chanced to lay my hand on the hilt of my sword, and I felt a terrible power coursing through it, and me. And I said to Bemossed, ‘I am sorry, but we cannot avoid this battle. If I called for our enemy’s surrender, we would give up our surprise. Our enemy would kill many of us, too many, perhaps even all, and our cause would be lost.’

  As I told him this, the weariness came over him again. He slumped as if his sinews had been cut. He gazed at me, and I wondered if he regarded his dispute with me as yet another exhausting battle that must be fought, as he must ever contend with Morjin.

  ‘King Valamesh, they call you now,’ he said to me. ‘King of Mesh. But what will it take, friend, for you to behold your true realm?’

  Then he excused himself, and
went off to his tent. For another hour, I stood talking with Kane about stratagems for war. I tried to sleep after that; perhaps I spent a short while in a land of dreams. Just before dawn, however, I was awakened by the hoofbeats and panting of a horse galloping up to my pavilion. I came out to greet Sar Siravay, a much-scarred warrior with ten battle ribbons tied to his long hair. And then he told me that he and Sar Torald had sighted the ghostly white sails of our enemy’s ships far out upon the moonlit sea.

  15

  At dawn, we marched east, straight toward the beach that my outriders had described. Our course took us through a valley and then through a cleft in the forested hills. Late that morning we came out into a long dell, where three low hills stood between us and the sea. From a woodcutter, one of my outriders had learned their names: Tirza, to our left, on the north, and Urza in the center. To our right rose the largest of these hills: a roundish mass sparsely covered with some oaks and bushes. Magda, the locals called it.

  I dismounted and climbed to the top of this hill, along with Kane and my captains, as well as Prince Viromar and Sar Yarwan. At its top, we peered out from behind trees to study the beach below. My outriders had made an accurate report of it. To the north, perhaps a mile beyond the slopes of Tirza, two immense black monoliths rose up from the white beach sands. I guessed that they must be made of basalt or some other hard rock. I wondered if the Galdans long ago had really buried King Darrum between them. I wondered, too, if the Galdans would soon try to pass through these Pillars of Heaven, for as I saw, Master Matai’s divination had proved true and now much of the Galdan army had already put ashore.

  Across a distance of half a mile, I looked out upon a confusion of tens of thousands of men crowding the beach like ants. They gathered in groups of ten or twenty, and seemed without organization. Casks and crates of supplies had been strewn about the beach; I saw men breaking open the crates with hammers and emptying their contents into packs that they would bear on the march. Other men stood knee-deep in water at the shore’s edge, coaxing whinnying horses down the gangplanks of rowboats. None of these beasts had been fitted with armor; indeed, only a few of the men had yet donned their suits of mail or steel-enforced leather, for our enemy clearly did not expect to do battle that day, and perhaps not even that week. Shields stood piled in heaps, and spears had been stuck down in the sand in rows. Many of the soldiers wore nothing more than tunics, with their swords nowhere near at hand. A good thousand of them stood naked in the shallows, bathing in the waters of the Terror Bay, where hundreds of ships lay anchored with their white sails gleaming in the sunlight. Travel at sea, as I knew, could be a cramped, foul affair, and so who could blame these soldiers for trying to get clean?

  The Karabukers, tall, black-skinned men who favored the spear above the sword, had disembarked on the beach to our left across from Tirza and the northern half of Urza. They were grouped in no better array. I could not make out a single, formed unit in all this manswarm and piles of weapons and gear. I looked for the standards of the Karabukers’ lords and captains, but of course they were hard to distinguish. In all the Dragon Kingdoms save Sunguru, not even the most renowned knight or lord was permitted to bear his own arms. The common soldiers wore yellow garments showing clusters of small red dragons, while King Mansul himself would be draped in a golden surcoat emblazoned with a three-quarter sized dragon. I wondered if the enemy’s king had led the way ashore, or still remained aboard his ship. Although such masses of men were difficult to count, I estimated that at least nine tenths of both the Karabukers and Galdans had made landfall.

  Without a word, I motioned to my captains and the Kaashans to follow me down the back slopes of the hill. We met up with King Talanu about half a mile to the west, along the banks of a little stream. We held council on horseback, and I described to King Talanu what I had seen from the top of Magda. Then we quickly laid our plans for battle.

  ‘Many of the Galdans on the other side of that hill,’ I said to King Talanu, pointing up at Magda, ‘invaded Mesh at Morjin’s command two years ago. My warriors would do best fighting them. But are you willing to go against the Karabukers?’

  ‘I am,’ he told me, fingering the hilt of his kalama. ‘But the Karabukers outnumber the Galdans, while my warriors are fewer in number than yours, King Valamesh. Will any of yours be willing to join me?’

  I nodded my head at this. King Talanu’s suggestion was the logical solution to the situation we faced, but I wanted him to come to it on his own and give voice to it, that it should not seem that I was commanding him.

  ‘They would be honored,’ I told him, ‘to march with you.’

  We arranged that Lord Sharad’s cavalry and most of Lord Tomavar’s battalions would form up with the Kaashans behind the gap between Tirza and Urza. The rest of the Meshian cavalry, which I would lead with Lord Avijan, and Lord Tanu’s infantry along with two battalions of Lord Tomavar’s, would take position between Urza and Magda. Then, upon a signal, the two halves of our army would debouch from the two gaps between the hills and fall upon our enemy.

  ‘What you propose, Sire,’ Lord Tanu said to me, ‘will require precise coordination. Our two forces will have to charge from either gap at full speed in column, and then deploy into line obliquely over a distance of nearly a mile so as to meet up in front of the middle hill.’

  He made a sour face as he pointed at the tree-covered Urza rising above the stream.

  ‘If any battle lord in the Morning Mountains,’ I said to him, ‘can lead such a maneuver, it is you, Lord Tanu.’

  Then I turned to Lord Tomavar and added, ‘And you.’

  At this, Lord Tomavar’s long face broke into a huge smile, so glad was he to be acclaimed. He seemed almost to have forgotten that he had nearly become King of Mesh instead of me.

  ‘Sire,’ he said to me, ‘the strategy is a bold one, but our two forces must meet, and quickly. As soon as the first of us emerges from between the hills, our enemy will spot us and give the alarm. We cannot afford to let any part of their army form up and force a wedge between us.’

  ‘No, we cannot,’ I said, stating the obvious. ‘What do you suggest?’

  I knew that Lord Tomavar, famed as Mesh’s finest and most daring tactician, would propose a solution to the problem at hand, and I had a fair idea of what that would be.

  ‘Do not,’ he said, ‘deploy all our cavalry to guard our flanks. Instead, lead half of them at a charge at our enemy’s center. Strike terror into their heart, and keep them from organizing. That will give Lord Tanu and me time to close up our lines and advance.’

  I noticed King Talanu staring at me, along with Prince Viromar, Lord Sharad, Lord Avijan and many others. If I took Lord Tomavar’s advice, I would find myself galloping straight toward the most dangerous part of the battlefield. I did not pause to wonder if Lord Tomavar harbored a wish that I might be killed; his plan, after all, was only what I had planned from nearly the moment when I had laid eyes upon our enemy. In any case, a king, a Valari king, must go first into the deadliest part of a battle, if that is where fate calls him to go.

  ‘Very well,’ I said to him. I turned to Lord Sharad. ‘Then will you help guard the Kaashans’ flank?’

  ‘Yes, Sire,’ he said, bowing his head to me.

  ‘And you, Lord Avijan,’ I said to the man who had championed my kingship. ‘Will you guard our flank?’

  ‘I will, Sire,’ he told me with a quick smile.

  Now I nudged my horse over to my uncle, King Talanu Solaru, who had perhaps survived more more battles than any warrior in all the Nine Kingdoms. I said to him, ‘It falls to us then to lead the attack against our enemy’s center. Let us meet by the sea and fight our enemy side by side.’

  He nodded his head at this, and we clasped hands and looked into each other’s eyes.

  ‘At the signal, then, we shall charge,’ he said to me. ‘But King Valamesh – are you sure of this signal?’

  Was I sure? I wondered. How could I ever be entirely sure of my best
friend?

  I glanced at Maram, bunched with the other knights of my vanguard against the base of Urza. He sat on his horse drinking from a waterskin. From the gleam of his eyes and the greed with which he sucked at this container, I knew that he had somehow filled it with brandy. In watching me watch him, I saw that he knew that I knew he had once again broken his vow. He seemed not to care. With battle only minutes away, he was doing all that he could to fortify himself so that he could carry out his duty.

  ‘Sar Maram!’ I called to him. ‘King Talanu would like to know if you will be able to get a little fire out of that crystal of yours?’

  As everyone turned to look at Maram, he put away his waterskin. He took out his long, red gelstei and shook it in the air. ‘No, I will not get a little fire out of this. I will burn the very sky! Wait and see, King Talanu! Watch and marvel!’

  It came time to move our forces into the gaps between the hills, and this my captains and King Talanu’s did. The terrain and the trees gave us good cover. With Sar Galajay riding beside me, I led Lord Tanu’s battalions and Lord Avijan’s cavalry between Urza and Magda. Only with difficulty did these seven thousand men crowd into this rocky space. Indeed, a good part of my force had to queue up behind the vanguard in a line that stretched nearly back to our baggage train and encampment. There, the Seven would wait with Liljana and the children. There, Master Juwain and the other healers would prepare the healing pavilion to receive the wounded, laying out their gleaming steel knives, clamps, arrow pullers and saws.