The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
with surprising smoothness and ease.
And so did a great deal of blood. It truth, it ran out of her like a bright red stream, flowing across her chest and wetting my hands with its warmth.
And all the while, Alphanderry knelt by her and sang:
Be ye songs of glory,Be ye songs of glory,That the light of the OneWill shine upon the world.
‘Maram!’ I heard Kane call out behind me. ‘Watch what you’re doing with that crystal!’
The quick clopping of many horses’ hooves against stone came closer, as did the hideous howling, which filled the pass with an almost deafening sound: OWRRULLL!
Kane glanced down at Atara, who was fighting to breathe, much air now wheezing out of her chest along with a frothy red spray.
‘So,’ he said. ‘So.’
Master Juwain touched her chest just above the place where the archer’s arrow had ripped open her lungs. Everyone knew that such sucking wounds were mortal.
‘She’s bleeding to death!’ I said to Master Juwain. ‘We have to staunch it!’
He stared at her, almost frozen in his thoughts. He said, ‘The wound is too grievous, too deep. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid there’s no way.’
‘Yes, there is,’ I said. I reached my bloody hand into his pocket where he kept his green crystal. I took it out and gave it to him. ‘Use this, please.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know how.’
‘Please, sir,’ I said again to him. ‘Use the gelstei.’
He sighed as he gripped his healing stone. He held it above Atara’s wound. He closed his eyes as if looking inside himself for the spark with which to ignite it.
‘I’m afraid there’s nothing,’ he said.
Maram, breaking off his fumblings with his crystal, said, ‘Ah, perhaps you should read from your book. Or perhaps a period of meditation would –’
‘There is no time,’ Master Juwain said with uncharacteristic vehemence. ‘Never enough time.’
OWRULLLLLLL!
Through my hand, I felt Atara’s pulse weakening. I felt her life ready to blow out like a candle flame in an ice-cold wind. I didn’t care then if Count Ulanu’s men fell upon us and captured us. I wanted only for Atara to live another day, another minute, another moment. Where there was life, I thought, there was always hope and the possibility of escape.
‘Please, sir,’ I said to Master Juwain, ‘keep trying.’
Again, Master Juwain closed his eyes even as his hard little hand closed tightly around the gelstei. But soon he opened them and shook his head.
‘One more time,’ I said to him. ‘Please.’
‘But there is no rhyme or reason to using this stone!’ he said bitterly.
‘No reason of the mind,’ I said to him.
Atara began moving her lips as if she wanted to tell me something. But no words came out of them, only the faintest of whispers. The touch of her breath against my ear was so cold it burned like fire.
‘What is it, Atara?’ In her eyes was a look of faraway places and last things. I pressed my lips to her ear and whispered, ‘What do you see?’
And she told me, ‘I see you, Val, everywhere.’
In her clear blue eyes staring up at me, I saw my grandfather’s eyes and the dying face of my mother’s grandmother. I saw our children, Atara’s and mine, who were worse than dead because we had never breathed our life into them.
A door to a deep, dark dungeon opened beneath Atara then. I was not the only one to look upon it. Atara, who could always see so much, and sometimes everything, turned and whispered, ‘Alphanderry.’
Alphanderry stood up and smoothed the wrinkles out of his tunic, stained with sweat, rain and blood. He smiled as Atara said, ‘Alphanderry, sing, it’s time.’
Just as Count Ulanu and the knights of his hard-riding guard showed themselves down the pass’s dark turnings, Alphanderry began walking toward them. I didn’t know what he was doing.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram said above me. ‘Here they come!’
OWRRULLLL! sang the voices of the Blues riding behind Count Ulanu as they clanked their axes together.
And Alphanderry, with a much different voice, sang out, ‘La valaha eshama halla, lais arda alhalla …’
His music had a new quality to it, both sadder and sweeter than anything I had ever heard before. I knew that he was close to finding the words that he had so long sought and opening the heavens with their sound.
‘Valashu Elahad!’ Count Ulanu called out as he rode with his captains and crucifiers inexorably toward us. ‘Lay down your weapons and you will be spared!’
And then, as the Count reined in his horse and stopped dead in his tracks, Alphanderry began singing more strongly. The Count looked at him as if he were mad. So did his captains and the knights and Blues behind him. But then Alphanderry’s song built ever larger and deeper, and began soaring outward like a flock of swans beating their wings up toward the sky. So wondrous was the music that poured out of him that it seemed the Count and his men couldn’t move.
Something in it touched Master Juwain, too, as I could tell from the faraway look that haunted his eyes. He was staring into the past, I thought, and looking for an answer to Atara’s approaching death in the fleeting images of memory or in the verses of the Saganom Elu. But he would never find it there.
‘Look at her,’ I said to Master Juwain. I took his free hand and brought it over Atara’s and mine so that it covered both of them. ‘Please look, sir.’
There was nothing more I could say to him, no more urgings or pleadings. I no longer felt resentment that he had failed to heal Atara, only an overwhelming gratitude that he had tried. And for Atara, I felt everything there was to feel. Her weakening pulse beneath my fingers touched mine with a deeper beating, vaster and infinitely finer. The sweet hurt of it reminded me how great and good it was to be alive. There seemed no end to it; it swelled my heart like the sun, breaking me open. And as I looked at Master Juwain eye to eye and heart to heart, he found himself in this luminous thing.
‘I never knew, Val,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, I see, I see.’
And then Master Juwain, who turned back to Atara, did look and seemed suddenly to see her. He found the reason of his heart as his eyes grew moist with tears. He found his greatness, too. Then he smiled as if finally understanding something. He touched the wound in her chest. Then he held the varistei over it, the long axis of the stone exactly perpendicular to the opening that the arrow had made. He took a deep breath and then let it out to the sound of Atara’s own anguished gasp.
I was waiting to see the gelstei glow with its soft, healing light. Even Kane, despite his despair, was looking at the stone as if hoping it would begin shining like a magical emerald. What happened next, I thought, amazed us all. A rare fire suddenly leaped in Master Juwain’s eyes. And then viridian flames almost too bright to behold shot from both ends of the gelstei; they circled to meet each other beneath it before shooting like a stream of fire straight into Atara’s wound. She cried out as if struck again with a burning arrow. But the green fire kept filling up the hole in her chest, and soon her eyes warmed with the intense life of it. A few moments later, the last of the fire swirled about the opening of the wound as if stitching it shut with its numinous light. As it crackled and then faded along her pale skin, we blinked our eyes, not daring to believe what we saw. For Atara was now breathing easily, and her flesh had been made whole.
‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram sighed out from above us. ‘Oh, my Lord!’
It seemed that neither Count Ulanu