The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One. David Zindell
‘Perhaps,’ I told him. ‘But perhaps it would only give them a better light to do their work in case they get really hungry.’
‘Val!’ Maram called out as he stood up with a large rock in either hand. ‘I don’t want to hear any more talk of hungry bears, all right?’
‘All right,’ I said, smiling. ‘But please don’t worry. If a bear comes close, the horses will give us warning.’
In the end, Maram had his way. In the space around which our sleeping furs were laid out, he dug a shallow pit and circled it with rocks. Then he moved off toward the hill where he found some dried twigs and branches among the deadwood beneath the trees and with great care he arrayed the tinder and kindling into a pyramid at the center of the pit. Then from his pocket he produced a flint and steel, and in only a few moments he coaxed the sparks from them into a cone of bright orange flames.
‘You have a talent with fire,’ Master Juwain told him. He dropped his gnarly body onto his sleeping fur and began ladling out the stew into three large bowls. Despite his years, he moved with both strength and suppleness, as if he had practiced his healing arts on himself. ‘Perhaps you should study to be an alchemist.’
Maram’s sensuous lips pulled back in a smile as he held his hands out toward the flames. His large eyes reflected the colors of the fire, and he said, ‘It has always fascinated me. I think I made my first fire when I was four. When I was fourteen, I burned down my father’s hunting lodge, for which he has never forgiven me.’
At this news, Master Juwain rubbed his lumpy face and told him, ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t be an alchemist.’
Maram shrugged off his comment with a good-natured smile. He clicked his fire-making stones together, and watched the sparks jump out of them.
‘What is the magic in flint and steel?’ he asked, speaking mostly to himself. ‘Why don’t flint and quartz, for instance, make such little lights? And what is the secret of the flames bound up in wood? How is it that logs will burn but not stone?’
Of course, I had no answers for him. I sat on my furs watching Master Juwain pulling at his jowls in deep thought. To Maram, I said, ‘Perhaps if we find the Lightstone, you’ll solve your mysteries.’
‘Well, there’s one mystery I’d like solved more than any other,’ he confided. ‘And that is this: How is it that when a man and a woman come together, they’re like flint and steel throwing out sparks into the night?’
I smiled and looked straight at him. ‘Isn’t that one of the lines of the poem you recited to Behira?’
‘Ah, Behira, Behira,’ he said as he struck off another round of sparks. ‘Perhaps I should never have gone to her room. But I had to know.’
‘Did you …?’
I started to ask him if he had stolen Behira’s virtue, as Lord Harsha feared, but then decided that it was none of my business.
‘No, no, I swear I didn’t,’ Maram said, understanding me perfectly well. ‘I only wanted to tell her the rest of my poem and –’
‘Your poem, Maram?’ We both knew that he had stolen it from the Book of Songs, and so perhaps did Master Juwain.
‘Ah, well,’ Maram said, flushing, ‘I never said outright that I had written it, only that the words came to me the first moment I saw her.’
‘You parse words like a courtier,’ I said to him.
‘Sometimes one must to get at the truth.’
I looked at the stars twinkling in the sky and said, ‘My grandfather taught me that unless one tries to get at the spirit of truth, it’s no truth at all.’
‘And we should honor him for that, for he was a great Valari king.’ He smiled, and his thick beard glistened in the reddish firelight. ‘But I’m not Valari, am I? No, I’m just a simple man, and it’s as a man that I went to Behira’s room. I had to know if she was the one.’
‘What one, Maram?’
The woman with whom I could make the ineffable flame. Ah, the fire that never goes out.’ He turned toward the fire, his eyes gleaming. ‘If ever I held the Lightstone in my hands, I’d use it to discover the place where love blazes eternally like the stars. That’s the secret of the universe.’
For a while, no one spoke as we sat there eating our midnight meal beneath the stars. Yushur had brought us an excellent stew full of succulent lamb, new potatoes, carrots, onions and herbs; we consumed it down to the last drop of gravy, which we mopped up with the fresh bread that Master Juwain had brought down from the Sanctuary. To celebrate our first night together on the road, I had cracked open a cask of beer. Master Juwain had taken only the smallest sip of it, but of course Maram had drunk much more. After his first serving, as his rumbling voice built castles in the air, I rationed the precious black liquid into his cup. But as the time approached for sleeping, it became apparent that I hadn’t measured out the beer carefully enough.
‘I simply must see Tria before I die,’ Maram told me in his rumbling voice. ‘As for the Quest, though, I’m afraid that from there you’ll be on your own, my friend. I’m no Valari knight, after all. Ah, but if I were, and I did gain the Lightstone, there are so many things I might do.’
‘Such as?’
‘Well, to begin with, I would return with it to Delu in glory. Then the nobles would have to make me king. Women would flock to me like lambs to sweet grass. I would establish a great harem as did the Delian kings of old. Then famous artists and warriors from all lands would gather in my court.’
I pushed the cork stopper into the half-empty cask as I looked at him and asked, ‘But what about love?’
‘Ah, yes, love,’ he said. He belched then sighed as he rubbed his eyes. ‘The always-elusive dream. As elusive as the Lightstone itself.’
In a voice full of self-pity, he declared that the Lightstone had certainly been destroyed, and that neither he nor anyone else was ever likely to find his heart’s deepest desire.
Master Juwain had so far endured Maram’s drinking spree in silence. But now he fixed him with his clear eyes and said, ‘My heart tells me that the prophecy will prove true. Starlight is elusive, too, but we do not doubt that it exists.’
‘Ah, well, the prophecy,’ Maram muttered. ‘But who are these seven brothers and sisters? And what are these seven stones?’
‘That, at least, should be obvious,’ Master Juwain said. ‘The stones must be the seven greater gelstei.’
He went on to say that although there were hundreds of types of gelstei, there were only seven of the great stones: the white, blue and green, the purple and black, the red firestones and the noble silver. Of course, there was the gold gelstei, but only one, known as the Gelstei, and that was the Lightstone itself.
‘So many have sought the master stone,’ he said.
‘Sought it and died,’ I said. ‘No wonder my mother wept for me.’
I went on to tell him that I would most likely be killed far from home, perhaps brought down by a plunging rock in a mountain pass or felled by a robber’s arrow in some dark woods.
‘Do not speak so,’ Master Juwain chastened me.
‘But this whole business,’ I said, ‘seems such a narrow chance.’
‘Perhaps it is, Val. But even a scryer can’t see all chances. Not even Ashtoreth herself can.’
For a while we fell silent as the wind pushed through the valley and the fire crackled within its circles of stones. I thought of Morjin and his master, Angra Mainyu, one of the fallen Galadin who had once made war with Ashtoreth and the other angels and had been imprisoned on a world named Damoom; I thought of this