The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
‘We’d heard there were strange knights about,’ Toman said, studying my surcoat and other accouterments. ‘We were afraid you might be Hesperuk spies.’
‘Do we look like spies?’ I said to him.
‘No, you don’t,’ he admitted graciously. ‘But not everyone is who they seem. The Hesperuks haven’t won half our kingdom through force of arms alone.’
I pulled myself on top of Altaru and patted his neck to steady him. To Toman, I said, ‘We’re not Kallimun priests, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Perhaps not,’ he said, ‘but that is for the King to decide. I’m afraid you’ll have to lay down your arms and come with us.’
At a nod from him, four of his knights rode up by his side with their lances held ready. Toman looked from Atara to Maram and then back at me. ‘Please give me your sword, Sar Valashu.’
‘I’ll give you mine,’ Kane growled as his eyes flashed and his hand moved quick as a snake’s to draw his sword.
‘Kane!’ I said. With almost miraculous control, Kane caught himself in mid-motion and stared at me. ‘Kane, don’t draw on him!’
But all of Toman’s knights had now drawn their swords. Unlike their armor, they showed no spot of rust.
‘You must understand,’ Toman said to me, ‘that we can’t allow you to go armed about our land – not with the Hesperuks knocking on our doors, too.’
‘Very well,’ I said, ‘but we’ve no desire to go riding about Surrapam at all – only to find a way to leave it.’
I explained that we were journeying to the Library at Khaisham; I told him that we had made vows to seek the Lightstone along with a thousand others in King Kiritan’s hall in Tria.
‘We’ve heard of this quest,’ he said, pulling at his beard. ‘But how do we know that you have truly set out upon it?’
I nudged Altaru forward, then drew forth the medallion that King Kiritan had given me. At the sight of this circle of gold, Toman’s eyes held wonder but no greed. Then, at my bidding, my companions approached to show their medallions as well. Toman’s knights, gathering around us, suddenly put away their swords at his bidding.
‘We must honor the impulse behind this quest, even if we do not believe in it,’ Toman said. ‘If you truly oppose the Crucifier, you’d do better to come to battle with us.’
‘That appears to be the thought of most of your countrymen,’ I said. Then I told him of meeting Thaman at Duke Rezu’s castle in Anjo, and his plea to the Valari.
‘You know Thaman of Bear Lake?’ one of Toman’s men asked in surprise. He was scarcely eighteen years old, and proved to be Toman’s grandson.
‘It seems you do,’ I said to him.
‘He’s my betrothed’s cousin,’ the man said, ‘and a great warrior.’
Our acquaintance with Thaman finally decided Toman. He smiled grimly at us and said, ‘Very well, you’re free to go, then. But please leave our land before you frighten anyone else.’
‘We’d leave it faster if we knew of a road through the mountains.’
Toman pointed off through the rain and dense greenery surrounding the farm and said, ‘There is a road – it’s about ten miles southeast of here. I would show it to you, but we’ve another hour before it’s dark and must ride on. But my other grandson, Jaetan, will take you to it if you tell him of our meeting and my wishes.’
He proceeded to give us directions to his estate. Then he said, ‘Well, we’re off to the assembly at Iram. Are you sure you won’t join us?’
‘Thank you, no – we have our road, and it leads east.’
‘Then farewell, Sar Valashu. Perhaps we’ll meet in better times.’
And with that, he and his men turned their horses and rode off down the road to the west.
Toman’s ‘estate’, when we found it an hour later, proved to be nothing more than a rather large, fortified house overlooking a barn and fields surrounded by a high fence of sharpened wooden poles. As he had promised, his family provided us shelter for the night. Toman’s daughter and two grandsons were all that was left to him, his son having died in the battle of the Maron and two granddaughters taken by fever last winter. Toman’s second grandson, Jaetan, was a freckle-faced redhead about thirteen years old – too young to ride off with his brother to war. And yet, I thought, I had gone to war at that age. It gladdened my heart, even as I filled with not a little pride, that even in the hour of their greatest need, the Surrapamers were not so war-loving as we Valari.
After we had laid our sleeping furs on the dry straw in the barn, Jaetan’s mother, Kandra, insisted on calling us into the house for a meal, even as we had feared. But as they had nothing more than a few eggs, some blackberry jam and flour to be baked into bread, our dinner was a long time in coming. Kane solved the problem of our eating up Toman’s family’s reserves in the most spectacular manner: as he had with Meliadus, he grabbed up his bow and stole off into the darkening woods. A half hour later, he returned with a young buck slung across his broad shoulders. It was a great feat of hunting, Kandra exclaimed, especially so considering that the forest hereabouts had been nearly emptied of deer.
And so we had a feast that night and everyone was happy. Kandra kept the remains of the deer, which more than made up for the bread that she baked us. In the morning, we set out well fed, with Jaetan leading the way on a bony-looking old nag that was a little too big for him.
After a couple of hours of riding up a gradually ascending dirt road, we came to a notch between two hills where the road seemed to disappear into a great, green wall of vegetation. Jaetan pointed into it and told us, ‘This is the old East Road. It’s said to lead into Eanna. But no one really knows because no one goes that way anymore.’
‘Except us,’ Maram muttered nervously.
Jaetan looked at him and told him, ‘The road is good enough, I think. But you should be careful of the bears, Master Maram. It’s said that there are still many bears in the mountains.’
‘Oh, excellent,’ Maram said, staring into the woods. ‘Bears, is it now?’
We thanked Jaetan for his hospitality, and then he turned to Kane and asked, ‘If you ever come back this way, will you teach me to hunt, sir?’
‘That I will,’ Kane promised as he reached out to rumple the boy’s hair. ‘That I will.’
With a few backward glances, Jaetan then rode back toward his grandfather’s house and the warmth of the hearth that awaited him.
‘Well,’ Maram said, ‘if the old maps are right, we’ve sixty miles of mountains to cross before we reach Eanna. I suppose we’d better start out before the bears catch our scent.’
But we saw no sign of bears all that day, nor the next nor even the one following that. The woods about us, though, were thick enough to have hidden a hundred of them. As the hills to either side of us rose and swelled into mountains, the giant trees of western Surrapam gave way to many more silver firs and nobles. These graceful evergreens, while not so tall as their lowland cousins, grew more densely. If not for the road, we would have been hard pressed to fight our way through them. This narrow muddy track had been cut along a snakelike course. And it turned like a snake, now curving south, now north, but always making its way roughly east as it gradually gained elevation. And with every thousand feet higher upon the green, humped earth on which we stood, it seemed that the rain poured down harder and the air fell colder.
Making camp in these misty mountains was very much a misery. The needles of the conifers, the bushes, the mosses and ferns about our soaked sleeping furs – everything the eye and hand fell upon was dripping wet. That Maram failed yet again with his fire dispirited us even more. When the day’s first