The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell
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The moon that night was just past full and tinged a glowing red. It hung low in conjunction with a blazing twist of stars that some called the Snake Constellation and others the Dragon.
‘Blood Moon in the Dragon,’ Master Juwain said. He sat sipping his tea and looking up at the sky. ‘I haven’t seen suchlike in many years.’
He brought out his book then, and sat reading quietly by the firelight, perhaps looking for some passage that would comfort him and turn his attention away from the stars. And then Liljana, who had gone off to wash the dishes in a small stream that led back to the Parth, returned holding some stones in her hand. They were black and shiny like Kane’s gelstei but had more the look of melted glass. Liljana called them Angels’ Tears; she said that wherever they were found, the earth would weep with the sorrow of the heavens. Atara gazed at these three, droplike stones as she might her much clearer crystal. Although her eyes darkened and I felt a great heaviness descend upon her heart like a stormcloud, she, too, sat quietly sipping her tea and saying nothing.
We slept uneasily that night, and Kane didn’t sleep at all. He stood for hours keeping watch, looking for lions in the shadows of the moon-reddened rocks or enemies approaching across the darkling plain. Alphanderry, who couldn’t sleep either, brought out his mandolet and sang to keep him company. And unseen by him, Flick spun only desultorily to his music. He seemed to want to hide from the bloody moon above us.
And so the hours of night passed, and the heavens turned slowly about the rutilant earth. When morning came, we had a better look at this harsher country into which we had ventured. Yarkona, Master Juwain said, meant the ‘Green Land’, but there was little of this hue about it. Neither true steppe nor quite desert, the sparse grass here was burnt brown by a much hotter sun. The yusage had been joined by its even tougher cousins: ursage and spiny sage, whose spiked leaves discouraged the brush voles and deer from browsing upon them. We saw a few of these cautious animals in the early light, framed by some blackish cliffs to the east. These sharp prominences had a charred look about them, as if the sun had set fire to the very stone. But Kane said their color came from the basalt that formed them; the rocks, he told us, were the very bones of the earth, which the hot winds blowing up from the south had laid bare.
He also told us that we had made camp in Sagaram, a domain that some local lord had carved out of this once-great realm perhaps a century before. We looked to him for knowledge that might help us cross it. But as he admitted, he had come this way many years ago, in more peaceful times. Since then, he said, the boundaries of Yarkona’s little baronies and possessions had no doubt shifted like a desert’s sands, perhaps some of them having been blown away by war altogether.
‘Aigul lies some sixty miles from here to the north and east,’ he told us. ‘Unless it has grown since then, and its counts have annexed lands to the south.’
These lands we set out to cross on that dry, windy morning. Sagaram proved to be little more than a thin strip of shrubs and sere grasses running seventy or so miles along the Parth. By early afternoon, we had made our way clear into the next domain, although no river or stone marked the border, and we didn’t realize it at the time. It took some more miles of plodding across the hot, rising plain before we found anyone who could give us directions. This was a goatherd who lived in a little stone house by a well in sight of a rather striking rock formation to the east of us.
‘You’ve come to Karkut,’ he told us as he shared a little cheese and bread with us. He was a short man, neither young nor old, with a great flowing tunic pulled over his spare frame and tied at the waist with a bit of dirty rope. ‘To the north of us lie Hansh and Aigul; to the south is the Nashthalan. That’s mostly desert now, and you’ll want to stay well to the north of it if you’re to come to Khaisham safely.’
While his two young sons watered our horses, he advised us to make our way directly east along the hills above the Nashthalan; after crossing through Sarad, he said, we should turn north along the dip in the White Mountains and so come to Khaisham that way.
But even as we were sharing a cup of brandy with him and eating some dried figs, a knight wearing a green and white surcoat over his gleaming mail came riding down from the rock formation above us. He had the same browned skin and dark beard as the goatherd, but he rode with an air of confidence as if his lord commanded the lands hereabouts. He presented himself as Rinald, son of Omar the Quiet; he said that he was in the service of Lord Nicolaym, who had a castle hidden in the rocks above us.
‘We saw you ride up to the well,’ he told us, looking from me to my friends. ‘We were afraid that you would pass this way unheralded.’
He came down from his horse and broke bread with us. He was only too happy to share some of our brandy, too, which was nearly the last of the vintage we had carried from Tria.
‘Lord Nicolaym,’ he said to us, ‘would like to offer his hospitality, for the night or as many nights as you wish.’
I thought of the golden cup that likely awaited us in Khaisham. An image sprang into my mind of time running out of it like the sands from an hourglass. If we came to Khaisham too late, I thought, we might find the Library emptied of the Lightstone, perhaps carried away by another.
‘Sar Valashu?’
I looked up at the sun, still high in the cloudless sky. We had many hours left that day that we might travel, and I told Rinald this.
‘Of course, you’re free to ride on as you please,’ Rinald said to us. ‘Lord Nicolaym doesn’t order the comings and goings of pilgrims or charge them tolls as some do. But you should be careful of where you go. Not everyone welcomes pilgrims these days.’
With an apology to the goatherd, he went on to dispute his advice that we should journey east through Sarad.
‘Baron Jadur’s knights are jealous of their borders there,’ Rinald told us. ‘Although they hate Count Ulanu, they’ve no love of Khaisham and the Librarians, either. It’s said that for many years they’ve turned pilgrims away from their domain – those they haven’t plundered or imprisoned.’
At this news, the goatherd took a drink of brandy and shrugged his shoulders. His business, he said, was keeping his goats fat and healthy, not in keeping apprised of the injustices of distant lords.
As for injustice, Rinald informed us sadly that there was too much of that in his own domain. ‘Duke Rasham is a good enough man, but some of his lords have gone over to the Kallimun – we’re not quite sure which ones. But there have been murders of those who speak for joining arms with Khaisham. We caught an assassin trying to murder Lord Nicolaym just last month. You should be careful in Karkut, I’m sorry to say, Sar Valashu. These are evil times.’
‘It would seem that we must take care wherever we go in Yarkona,’ I told him.
‘That is true,’ he said. ‘But there are some domains you must avoid at all costs. Aigul, of course. And to the west of those crucifiers, Brahamdur, whose baron and lords are practically Count Ulanu’s slaves. And Sagaram – you were lucky to cross it unmolested, for they’ve been forced into an alliance with Aigul. To the north of us, between here and Aigul, Hansh has nearly lost its freedom as well. It’s said that soon Count Ulanu will press Hansh levies into his army.’
Maram, of course, didn’t like the news that he was hearing. He looked at me a long moment before asking Rinald, ‘How are we to reach Khaisham, then?’
‘The route through Madhvam would be the safest,’ Rinald said, naming the domain just east of us. ‘There’s strength there for opposing Count Ulanu; their knights would join Khaisham in arms but for their bad blood with Sarad. That feud occupies all their attention, I’m afraid. I haven’t heard, though, that they have any quarrel with pilgrims.’
But Madhvam, as Maram learned, adjoined Aigul to its north, and that was too close for him. ‘What if this Ulanu the Handsome attacks Madhvam while we’re crossing it?’
‘No, that’s impossible,’ Rinald said. ‘We’ve