The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
But we’re far from Imatru, and I doubt if King Hanniban holds any sway here.’
What peoples or lords we might find in the realm below us, he didn’t know. But he admonished us to be wary, for out on the plain we would have no cover, either from men or the wolves and lions who hunted the antelope there.
‘Wolves!’ Maram exclaimed. ‘Lions! – I think I’d rather keep company with the bears.’
But all that first day of our journey across Eanna, neither his fears nor Kane’s took form to bring us harm. We left the road only a couple of miles from the mountains. It turned south, whether toward some lost city in this pretty country or toward nowhere, none of us could say. The Red Desert, Kane told us, lay not so very far in that direction, and its drifting vermilion sands and dunes had swallowed up more than one city over the millennia. We were lucky, he said, that Alkaladur seemed to point us along a path above this endless wasteland, for other than the fierce tribes of the Ravirii, no one could survive the desert’s murderous sun for very long.
As it was, we felt a whiff of its heat even hundreds of miles north of the heart of it. But after the freezing rains of the mountains, we welcomed this sudden warming of the air, for it was dry like the breath of the stars and clean, and did not smother us. It did not last long, either, giving way soon after noon to gentle breezes that swept through the swaying grasses and touched our faces with the scents of strange new plants and flowers. And at night, beneath the constellations that hung in the heavens like a brilliant, blazing tapestry, it fell quite cool – not so much that it chilled our bones, but rather that bracing crispness that sharpens all the senses and invites the marvel of the infinite.
We all slept quite well through that first dark out on the steppe – except during those hours when we were standing watch or simply gazing up at the stars from our beds on top of the long grass. The moon rose over the world like a gleaming half-shield; beneath it, from far out across the luminous earth, wolves howled and lions roared. I dreamed of these animals that night, and of eagles and falcons, and great silver swans that flew so high they caught the fire of the stars. When I awoke in the morning to a sky so blue that it seemed to go on forever, I felt this fire in me, warming my heart and calling me to journey forth toward the completion of our quest.
We rode hard all that day and the next, and the two following that. Although I worried we might press the horses too strenuously, they took great strength from the grass all around us, both in its sweet smell and in the bellyfuls they bit off and ate at midday and night. After many days of picking their way up and down steep mountain tracks studded with sharp rocks, they seemed glad for the feel of soft earth beneath their hooves. It was their pleasure to keep moving across the windy steppe, at a fast walk and sometimes at a canter or even a gallop. I felt my excitement flowing into Altaru and firing up his great heart, and his delight in running unbound across the wild and open steppe passing back into me. Sometimes he raced Iolo or Fire just for the sheer singing joy of it. And at such moments, I realized that our souls were free, and each of us knew this in the surging of our blood and our breaths upon the wind – and in the promises we made to ourselves.
It was hard for me, used to the more circumscribed horizons of mountainous or wooded country, to see just how far we traveled each day. But Atara had a better eye for distances here. She put the tally at a good fifty miles. So it was that we crossed almost the whole length of southern Eanna in very little time. And in all that wide land, dotted with cottonwood trees whose silver-green leaves were nearly as beautiful as astors’, we saw almost no people.
‘I should think someone would live here,’ Liljana said on the fifth morning of our journey across the steppe. ‘This is a fair land – it can’t be the wolves that have scared them away. Nor even the lions.’
Later that day, toward noon, we came across some nomads who solved the mystery of Eanna’s emptiness for us. The head of the thirty members of this band, who lived in tents woven from the hair of the shaggy cattle they tended, boldly presented himself as Jacarun the Elder. He was a whitebeard whose bushy brows overhung his suspicious old eyes. But when he saw that we meant no harm and wanted only to cross his country, he was free with the milk and cheeses that his people got from their cattle – and with advice as well.
‘We are the Telamun,’ he explained to us as we broke from our journey to take a meal with his family. ‘And once we were a great people.’
He told us that only a few generations before, the Telamun in their two great tribes had ruled this land. So great was their prowess at arms that the Kings in Imatru had feared to send their armies here. But then, after a blood-feud brought about by a careless insult, murder and an escalating sequence of revenge killings, the two tribes had gone to war against each other rather than with their common enemies. In the space of only twenty years, they had nearly wiped each other out.
‘A few dozen families like ours, we’re all that’s left,’ Jacarun said as he held up his drover’s staff and swept it out across the plain. ‘Now we’ve given up war – unless you count beating off wolves with sticks as war.’
He went on to say that their days as a free people were almost over, for others were now eyeing his family’s ancient lands and even moving into them.
‘King Hanniban has been having trouble with his barons, it’s said, so hasn’t yet been able to muster the few companies that it would take to conquer us,’ he told us. ‘But some of the Ravirii have come up from the Red Desert – they butchered a family not fifty miles from here. And the Yarkonans, well, in the long run, they’re the real threat, of course. Count Ulanu of Aigul – they call him Ulanu the Handsome – has it in mind to conquer all of Yarkona in the Red Dragon’s name and set himself up as King. If he ever does, he’ll turn his gaze west and send his crucifiers here.’
He called for one of his daughters to bring us some roasted beef. And then, after fixing his weary old eyes on Kane and my other friends, he looked at me and asked, ‘And where are you bound, Sar Valashu?’
‘To Yarkona,’ I said.
‘Aha, I thought so! To the Library at Khaisham, yes?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Well, you’re not the first pilgrims to cross our lands on their way to the Library, though you may be the last.’ He sighed as he lifted his staff toward the sky. ‘There was a time, and not so long ago, when many pilgrims came this way. We always charged them tribute for their safe passage, not much, only a little silver and sometimes a few grains of gold. But those days are past; soon it is we who will have to pay tribute for living here. In any case, no one goes to Yarkona anymore – it’s an accursed land.’
He advised us that, if we insisted on completing our journey, we should avoid Aigul and Count Ulanu’s demesne at all costs.
We ate our roasted beef then, and washed it down with some fermented milk that Jacarun called laas. After visiting with his family and admiring the fatness of their cattle – and restraining Maram from doing likewise with their women – we thanked Jacarun for his hospitality and set out again.
Soon the steppe, which had gradually been drying out as we drew further away from the Crescent Mountains, grew quite sere. The greens of its grasses gave way to yellow and umber and more somber tones. Many new shrubs found root here in the rockier soil: mostly bitterbroom and yusage, as Kane named these tough-looking plants. They gave shelter to lizards, thrashers, rock sparrows and other animals that I had never seen before. As the sun fell down the long arc of the sky behind us in its journey into night, it grew slightly warmer instead of cooler. We put quite a few miles behind us, though not so many as on the four preceding afternoons. The horses, perhaps sensing that they would find less water and food to the east, began moving more slowly as if to conserve their strength. And as we approached the land that Jacarun had warned us against, we turned our gazes inward to look for strength of our own.
And then, just before dusk, with the sun casting its longest rays over a glowing, reddened land, we came to a little trickle of water that Kane called the Parth. From its sandy banks, we looked out on the distant rocky outcroppings of Yarkona. There, I prayed, we would at last find the end of our journey and