The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 8

  I whispered back to Ravar. ‘None of them looks like the one who shot at me.’

  ‘But what of the Ishkans?’ he asked with a gleam in his eyes. ‘You haven’t even looked at them, have you, Val?’

  Of course, I hadn’t. And of course Ravar had noticed that I hadn’t. He had quick, black eyes and an even quicker wit. Mandru and the stolid Karshur often accused him of living in his mind, a battlefield upon which no Valari should dwell for too long. Like me he had no natural liking for war: he preferred fencing with words and ideas. Unlike me, however, he was very good at real war because he saw it as a way of perfecting both his mind and his will. Although there were some who thought him unworthy to wear the three diamonds of a master knight, I had seen him lead a company of men at the Battle of Red Mountain and cast his lance through Sar Manashu’s eye at a distance of twenty yards.

  As Ravar began to study the Ishkans, perhaps looking for weaknesses with the same concentration that he had turned on Waas’s army, I did the same. And immediately my eyes fell upon an arrogant man with a great scar running down the side of his face. Although he had a great beak of a nose like an eagle, his father and mother had bestowed upon him scarcely any chin. His eyes, I thought, were like pools of stagnant black water, and seemed to suck me down into the coldness of his heart even as they challenged me. Because I didn’t like the slimy feeling that crept into my belly just then, I gazed instead at his bright red tunic, which bore the great white bear of the Ishkan royalty. I recognized him as Prince Salmelu, King Hadaru’s oldest son. Five years before, at the great tournament in Taron, in a game of chess, I had humiliated him in a crushing defeat that had taken only twenty-three moves. It wasn’t enough that he had won the gold medal in the fencing competition and had acquitted himself honorably in the horsemanship and archery competitions; it seemed he had to be preeminent at everything, for he took insult easily, especially from those who had bested him. It was said that he had fought fifteen men in duels – and left all fifteen dead in pools of blood. One of his brothers, Lord Issur, shared the table with him, along with Lord Mestivan and Lord Nadhru and other prominent Ishkans whom Ravar pointed out to me.

  ‘Do any of them look like your assassin?’ Ravar asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell – the man’s face was hooded.’

  And then, even as I closed my eyes and opened myself to the hum of hundreds of voices, I felt the same taint of wrongness that I had in the woods. The red, twisting worms of someone’s hate began eating their way up my spine. From what man in the hall this dreadful sensation emanated, however, I couldn’t tell.

  At last, the wine having been poured, my father lifted up his goblet and stood to make the opening toast. All eyes in the hall turned his way; all voices trailed off and then died into silence as he began to speak.

  ‘Masters of the Brotherhood,’ he began, ‘princes and lords, ladies and knights, we would like to welcome you to this gathering tonight. It’s a strange chance that brings King Kiritan’s emissaries to Mesh at the same time that King Hadaru sends his eldest son to honor us. But let us hope that it’s a good chance and a sign of good times to come.’

  My father, I thought, had a fine, strong voice that rang from the stones of the hall. He fairly shone with strength, both in the inner steel of his soul and in his large, long hands that could still grip a sword with great ferocity. At fifty-four he was just entering the fullest flower of manhood, for the Valari age more slowly than do other peoples – no one knows why. His long black hair, shot with strands of snowy white, flowed out from beneath a silver crown whose points were set with brilliant white diamonds. Five other diamonds, arrayed into the shape of a star, shimmered from a great, silver ring. It was the ring of a king, and someday Asaru would wear it if no one killed him first.

  ‘And so,’ my father continued, ‘in the hope of finding the way toward the peace that all desire, we invite you to take salt and bread with us – and perhaps a little meat and ale as well.’

  My father smiled as he said this, to leaven the stiffness of his formal speech. Then he motioned for the grooms to bring out what he had called a ‘little meat.’ In truth, there were many platters laden with steaming hams and roasted beef, along with elk, venison and other game. There were fowls almost too numerous to count: nicely browned ducks, geese, pheasants and quail – though of course no swans. It seemed that hunters such as Asaru and I had slaughtered whole herds and flocks that day. The grooms served baskets heaped with black barley bread and the softer white breads, aged cheeses, butter, jams, apple pies, honeycomb and pitchers of frothing black beer. There was so much food that the long wooden tables fairly groaned beneath its weight.

  Although I was very hungry, my belly seemed a knot of acid and pain, and I could hardly eat. And so I picked at my food as I looked out into the hall. Along the walls were tapestries depicting famous battles that my people had fought and many portraits of my ancestors. The light of hundreds of candles illuminated the faces of Aramesh, Duramesh, and the great Elemesh who had utterly crushed the Sarni at the Battle of the Song River. In their ancient countenances I saw traits that my brothers shared to this day: Yarashan’s pride, Karshur’s strength, Jonathay’s almost unearthly calm and beauty. There was much to admire in these kings, who were a reminder of the debt that we owed to those who give us life.

  My brothers seemed all too aware of this debt of blood. Between bites of wild turkey or bread, washed down with drafts of beer, they spoke of their willingness to make war with the Ishkans should it become necessary to fight. They spoke of the causes for this war, too: the killing of the Ishkan crown prince in a duel with my grandfather two generations earlier, and my grandfather’s own death at the Battle of the Diamond River. Yarashan, who fancied himself a student of history (although he had studied only lineages and battles), brought up the War of the Two Stars early in the Age of Law in which Mesh and Ishka had taken opposing sides. The Ishkans had fought my ancestors over the possession of the Lightstone; we had badly defeated them at the Raaswash, where their king, Elsu Maruth, had been killed. It was the greatest of ironies, I thought, that this healing vessel had been the source of woe for so long.

  ‘The Ishkans will never forget that battle,’ I heard Asaru say to Ravar. ‘But in the end, it will all come down to the mountain.’

  Everyone, of course, knew of which mountain he spoke: Mount Korukel, one of the great guardian peaks that stood upon the border between Mesh and Ishka just beyond the feeder streams of the Upper Raaswash River. The Ishkans were pressing their old demand that the border of our two kingdoms should exactly bisect Mount Korukel, while we of the swan and stars claimed the whole mountain as Meshian soil.

  ‘But Korukel is ours,’ Yarashan said as he used a napkin to neatly wipe the beer from his lips. In his outward form, he was almost as beautiful a man as Jonathay and even prouder than Asaru.

  What was half a mile of rock against men’s lives? I wondered. Well, if many of those rocks were diamonds, it was a great deal indeed. For the lives of men – the Valari warriors of each of the Nine Kingdoms – had been connected to the fabulous mineral wealth of the Morning Mountains for thousands of years. From their silver we made our emblems and the gleaming rings with which we pledged our lives; from its iron we made our steel. And from the diamonds we found deep underground and sometimes sparkling in the shallows of clear mountain streams, we made our marvelous suits of armor. In the Age of Swords, before the Brotherhoods had broken with the Valari, it had been the Brothers who had learned to work these hardest and most beautiful of stones; they had discovered the secret of affixing them to corslets of black leather and then taught us this art. While it was not true that this diamond-encrusted armor afforded the Valari invulnerability in battle – an arrow or a well-aimed spear thrust could find a chink between the carefully set diamonds – many were the swords that had broken upon it. The mere sight of a Valari army marching into battle and glittering in their ranks as if raimented with millions of stars had str
uck terror into our enemies for most of three long ages. They called us the Diamond Warriors, and said that we could never be defeated by force of arms alone, but only through treachery or the fire of the red gelstei.

  And recently a great new vein of diamonds had been discovered running through the heart of Mount Korukel. Naturally, the Ishkans wanted to mine it for themselves.

  When the last pie had been eaten and nearly everyone’s belly groaned from much more than a little meat, it came time for the rounds of toasting. It would have been more sensible, of course, to hold this drinking fest after discussing the rather serious business that the Alonians and Ishkans had come for. But we Valari honored our traditions, and the end of a meal was the time for paying one’s respects to guests and hosts alike.

  The first to stand that day was Count Dario. He was a compact man who moved with quick, deft gestures of his arms and hands. He took up a goblet of black beer and presented it toward my father, saying, ‘To King Shamesh, whose hospitality is overmatched only by his wisdom.’

  A clamor of approval rang through the hall, but Prince Salmelu, like the swordsman he was, took advantage of the opening that Count Dario had unwittingly presented him. Like an uncaged bear, he stood, stretched and planted his feet wide apart on the floor. He fingered the many colored battle ribbons tied to his long hair with his right hand before resting it on the hilt of his sword. Then with his left hand, he raised his goblet and said, ‘To King Shamesh. May he find the wisdom to do what we all wish for in walking the road toward peace.’

  As I touched my lips to my beer, he flashed me a quick, hard look as if testing me with a feint of his sword.

  I knew that I should have thought of an immediate rejoinder to his thinly veiled demand. But the maliciousness in his eyes held me to my chair. Instead, it was my usually unimaginative brother, Karshur, who stood and raised his goblet.

  ‘To King Shamesh,’ he said in a voice that sounded like boulders rolling down a mountain. He himself was built like an inverted mountain: as if successive slabs of granite had been piled higher and deeper from his thick legs to his massive shoulders and chest. ‘May he find the strength to do what he has to do no matter what others may wish.’

  As soon as he had returned to his chair, Jonathay stood up beside him. He had all of our mother’s beauty and much of her grace as well. He was a fatalistic but cheerful man who liked to play at life, most especially at war – though with skillful and deadly effect. He laughed good-naturedly as if enjoying this duel of words. ‘To Queen Elianora, may she always find the patience to endure men’s talk of war.’

  All at once, from the tables throughout the hall, the many women there raised their goblets as if by a single hand and called out, ‘Yes, yes, to Queen Elianora!’

  As a nervous laughter spread from table to table, my mother stood and smoothed out the folds of her black gown. Then she smiled kindly. Although she directed her words out into the hall, it seemed that she was speaking right at Salmelu.

  ‘To all our guests this evening,’ she said, ‘thank you for making such long journeys to honor our home. May the food we’ve all shared nourish our bodies, and may the good company we bring open our hearts so that we act out of the true courage of compassion rather than fear.’

  So saying, she turned to Salmelu and beamed a smile at him. In her bright eyes there was only an open desire for fellowship. But her natural grace seemed to infuriate Salmelu rather than soothe him. He sat deathly still in his chair gripping the hilt of his sword as his face flushed with blood. Although Salmelu had stood sword to naked sword with fifteen men in the ring of honor, he couldn’t seem to bear the gentleness of my mother’s gaze.

  Because it would have been unseemly for him to stand again while others waited to make their toasts, he cast a quick, ferocious look at Lord Nadhru as if to order him to speak in his place. And so Lord Nadhru, a rather angry young man who might have been Salmelu’s twin in his insolent nature if not appearance, sprang up from his chair.

  ‘To Queen Elianora,’ he said, looking over the rim of his goblet. ‘We thank her for reminding us that we must always act with courage, which we promise to do. And we thank her for welcoming us into her house, even as she was once welcomed herself.’

  This, I thought, was the Ishkans’ way of reminding her that she was as much of an outsider in the castle as they were, and therefore that she had no real right to speak for Mesh. But of course this was just pure spite on their part. For Elianora wi Solaru, sister of King Talanu of Kaash, had chosen freely to wed my father and not their greedy, old king.

  And so it went, toast after toast, both Ishkans and Meshians casting words back and forth as if they were velvet-covered spears. All this time my father sat as still and grave in his chair as any of our ancestors in the portraits lining the walls. Although he kept most of the fire from his eyes, I could feel a whole stew of emotions boiling up inside him: pride, anger, loyalty, outrage, love. One who didn’t know him better might have thought that at any moment he might lose his patience and silence his attackers with a burst of kingly thunder. But my father practiced self-restraint as others did wielding their swords. No man, I thought, asked more of himself than he. In many ways he embodied the Valari ideal of flowingness, flawlessness and fearlessness. As I, too, struggled to keep my silence, he suddenly looked at me as if say, ‘Never let the enemy know what you’re thinking.’

  I believe that my father might have allowed this part of the feast to continue half the night so that he might better have a chance to study the Ishkans – and his own countrymen and sons. But the toasting came to a sudden and unexpected end, from a most unexpected source.

  ‘My lords and ladies!’ a strong voice suddenly bellowed out from below our table, ‘I would like to propose a toast.’

  I turned just in time to see Maram push back his chair and stand away from the Brothers’ table. How Maram had acquired a goblet full of beer in plain sight of his masters was a mystery. And clearly it was not his first glass either, for he used his fat, beer-stained fingers to wipe the dried froth from his mustache as he wobbled on his feet. And then he raised his goblet, spilling even more beer on his stained tunic.

  ‘To Lord Harsha,’ he said, nodding toward his table. ‘May we all thank him for providing this wonderful drink tonight.’

  That was a toast everyone could gladly drink to; all at once hundreds of goblets, both of glass and silver steel, clinked together, and a grateful laughter pealed out into the room. I looked across the hall as Lord Harsha shifted about in his chair. Although he was plainly embarrassed to have been singled out for his generosity, he smiled at Maram all the same. If Maram had left well enough alone and sat back down, he might even have gained Lord Harsha’s favor. But Maram, it seemed, could never leave anything alone.

  ‘And now I would like to drink to love and beautiful women,’ he said. He turned to Behira, fairly drinking in the sight of her as if the sensibilities of the hundreds of people looking on didn’t matter. ‘Ah, the love of beautiful women – it’s what makes the world turn and the stars shine, is it not?’

  Master Juwain looked up at Maram but Maram ignored his icy stare.

  ‘It’s to the most beautiful woman in the world that I would now like to dedicate this poem, whose words came into my mind like flowers opening the first moment I saw her.’

  He raised his goblet toward Behira. Forgetting that he was supposed to wait until after the toast before drinking, he took a huge gulp of beer. And all the while, Behira sat next to her father flushing with embarrassment. But it was clear that Maram’s attentions delighted her, for she smiled back at him, glowing with an almost tangible heat.

  ‘Brother Maram,’ Lord Harsha suddenly called out in his gravelly old voice, ‘this isn’t the place for your poetry.’

  But Maram ignored him, too, and began his poem:

  Star of my soul, how you shimmer

  Beyond the deep blue sky,

  Whirling and whirling – you and I whisperlessly

&
nbsp; Spinning sparks of joy into the night.

  I stared at the rings glittering from Maram’s fingers and the passion pouring from his eyes. The words of his poem outraged me. For it wasn’t really his poem at all; he had stolen the verse of the great but forgotten Amun Amaduk and was passing it off as his own.

  Lord Harsha pushed back his chair and called out even more strongly, ‘Brother Maram!’

  Maram would have done well to heed the warning in Lord Harsha’s voice. But by this time he was drunk on his own words (or rather Amun’s), and with childlike abandon began the second stanza of the poem:

  From long ago we came across the universe:

  Lost rays of light, we fell among strange new flowers

  And searched in fields and forests

  Until we found each other and remembered.

  Now Lord Harsha, gritting his teeth against the pain of his broken knee, suddenly rose to his feet. With surprising speed, he began advancing down the row of tables straight at Maram. And still Maram continued reciting his poem:

  Soul of my soul, for how few moments

  Were we together on this wandering earth

  In the magic of our love

  Dancing in the eyelight, breathing as one?

  Suddenly, with a sound of fury in his throat, Lord Harsha drew his sword. Its polished steel pointed straight at Maram, who finally closed his mouth as it occurred to him that he had gone too far. And Lord Harsha, I was afraid, had gone too far to stop, too. Almost without thinking, I leaped up from my chair, crossed the dais, and jumped down to the lower level of the guests’ tables. My boots hit the cold stone with a loud slap. Then I stepped in front of Maram just as Lord Harsha closed the distance between them and pointed the tip of his sword at my heart.