This was a single warrior who stood staring down at the men from the top of the hill. I immediately noted the long, blond hair that spilled from beneath the warrior’s conical and pointed helmet; I couldn’t help staring at the warrior’s double-curved bow and the studded leather armor, for these were the accoutrements of the Sarni, which tribe I couldn’t tell. A ring of dead men lay in the stunted grass fifty yards from the warrior farther down the hill. Arrows stuck out of them, too. In all of Ea, there were no archers like the Sarni and no bows that pulled so powerfully as theirs. But this warrior, I thought, would never pull a bow again because his quiver was empty and he had no more arrows to shoot. All he could do was to stand near his downed horse and wait for the hill-men to advance through the ring of their fallen countrymen and begin the butchery they so obviously intended.
‘All right,’ Maram murmured at me from behind his tree, ‘you’ve seen what you came to see. Now let’s get out of here!’
As quickly as I could, I nudged Altaru over to my pack horse where I untied the great helmet slung over his side. I untied as well the shield that my father had given me and thrust my arm through it. My side still hurt so badly that I could barely hold it. But I scarcely noticed this pain because I had worse wounds to bear.
‘What are you doing?’ Maram snapped at me. ‘This isn’t our business. That’s a Sarni warrior, isn’t it? A Sarni, Val!’
Master Juwain agreed with him that the course of action on which I was setting out perhaps wasn’t the wisest. But since the Brotherhood teaches showing compassion to the unfortunates of the world, neither did he suggest that we should flee. He just stood there in the trees weighing different stratagems and wondering how the three of us–and one Sarni warrior–could possibly prevail against ten fierce and vengeful hill-men.
I slipped the winged helmet over my head then. I took up my lance and couched it beneath my good arm. How could I explain why I did this? I could hardly explain it to myself. After many miles of being hunted, I couldn’t bear the sight of this warrior being hunted and bravely preparing to die. For Master Juwain, compassion was a noble principle to be honored wherever possible; for me it was a terrible pain piercing my heart. For some reason I didn’t understand, I found myself opening to this doomed warrior. A proud Sarni he might be, but something inside him was calling for help, even as a child might call, and hoping that it might miraculously come.
‘That man,’ I told Maram, ‘could have been Sar Avador. He could be my brother–he could be you.’
And with that, I touched my heels to Altaru’s sides and rode out of the trees. I pressed him to a gallop; it was a measure of his immense strength that he quickly achieved this gait driving his hooves into the ground that sloped upward before us. I felt the great muscles of his rump bunching and pushing us into the air. He wheezed and snorted, and I felt his lust for battle. The hill-men had now drawn closer to the warrior, who stood waiting for them with nothing more than a saber and a little leather shield. His ten executioners, with their painted faces and bodies, advanced as a single mass, clumped foolishly close together. Their leader blew his bloody horn again and again to give them courage; they struck their weapons against their wooden shields as they screamed out obscenities and threatened fiendish tortures. This din must have drowned out the sound of Altaru pounding toward them, for they didn’t see me until the last moment. But the warrior, looking downhill, did. He somehow guessed that I was charging toward the hill-men and not him; it must have mystified him why a Valari knight would ride to help him. But he left all such wonderings for a later moment. He let out a high-pitched whoop and charged the hill-men even as I lowered my lance and prepared to crash into them.
Just then, however, one of the hill-men turned toward me and let out a cry of dismay. This alerted the others, who froze wide-eyed in astonishment, not knowing what to do. I might easily have pushed the lance’s point through the first man’s neck. Altaru’s snorting anger, and my own, drove me to do so; the nearness of death touched me with a terrible exhilaration. But then I remembered my vow never to kill anyone again. And so I raised the lance, and as we swept past the man, I used its steel-shod butt to strike him along the side of his head. He fell stunned to the side of the hill. One of his friends tried to unhorse me with a blow of his mace, but I caught it with my father’s shield. Then the infuriated Altaru struck out with his hoof and broke through his shield and shoulder with a sickening crunch. He screamed in agony, even as I bit my lip in an effort not to scream, too.
Through the heat of the battle, I was somehow aware of the Sarni warrior closing with the hill-men’s leader and opening his throat with a lightning slash of his saber. I immediately began coughing at the bubbling of blood I felt in my own throat. Then one of the hill-men swung his axe at my back, and only my Godhran-forged armor kept it from chopping through my spine. I whirled about in my saddle and struck him in the face with my shield. He stumbled to one knee, and I hesitated for an endless moment as I trembled to spear him with my lance.
And in that moment, the Sarni warrior cut through to him and ruthlessly finished him as well. A mail beaver fastened to the warrior’s helm hid most of his face, but I could see his blue eyes flashing like diamonds even as his saber flashed out and struck off the man’s head. His prowess of arms and rare fury–and, I supposed, my own wild charge–had badly dispirited the hill-men. When an arrow came whining suddenly out of the trees below us and buried itself in the ground near one of the hill-men to my right, he pointed downhill at Maram standing by a tree with my hunting bow. And then he cried out, ‘They’ll kill us all–run for your lives!’
In the panic that followed, the Sarni warrior managed to kill one more of the hill-men before his comrades turned their backs to us and fled down the hill toward the east, where a slight rise in the ground provided some cover against Maram’s line of fire. I believe that the warrior might have pursued them to slay a few more if I hadn’t slumped off my horse just then.
‘No, please–no more killing,’ I said as I held my hand palm outward and shook my head. I stood by Altaru, and grasped the pommel of his saddle to keep from falling.
‘Who are you, Valari?’ the warrior called to me.
I looked down the hill where the seven surviving men had disappeared into the woods. I looked at Maram and Master Juwain now making their way up the hill toward us. Except for the heavy breath steaming out of Altaru’s huge nostrils, and my own labored breathing, the world had grown suddenly quiet.
‘My name is Valashu Elahad,’ I gasped out. I felt weak and disconnected from my body, as if my head had been cut off like the hill-man’s and sent spinning into space. I pulled off my helm, then, the better to feel the wind against me. ‘And who are you?’
The warrior hesitated a moment as I pressed my hand to my side. I felt the blood soaking through my armor. The battle had reopened the wound there, as well as the deeper wound that would never be healed.
‘My name is Atara,’ the warrior said, removing his helm as well. ‘Atara Manslayer of the Kurmak. Thank you for saving my life.’
I gasped again, but not in pain. I stared at the long golden hair flowing down from Atara’s head and the soft lines of Atara’s golden face. It was now quite clear that Atara was a woman–the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And though our enemies were either dead or dispersed, something inside her still called to me.
‘Atara,’ I said as if her name were an invocation to the angels who walked the stars, ‘you’re welcome.’
I suddenly knew that there was much more than a bond of blood between us. I looked into her eyes then, and it was like falling–not into the nothingness where she had sent the hill-men, but into the sacred fire of two brilliant, blue stars.
11
For what seemed forever, Atara held this magical connection of our eyes. Then, with what seemed a great effort of will, she looked away and smiled in embarrassment as if she had seen too much of me – or I of her.
She said, ‘Please excuse me, th
ere’s work to be done.’
She walked back and forth across the hill, scanning the tree line for sign that the hill-men might attack again. She looked upon Maram and Master Juwain with scant curiosity, then quickly went about the bloodstained slope cutting her arrows out of the bodies of the fallen men. She used her saber with all the precision of Master Juwain probing a wound with a scalpel. And as she went from man to man, she counted out loud, beginning with the number five. At first, I thought her accounting had something to do with the number of arrows she had fired or recovered. But when she reached the body of the hill-men’s leader, whom no arrow had struck, she quietly said, ‘Fourteen.’ And the headless body of the man she had beheaded was fifteen, whatever that might mean.
And then, as Maram and Master Juwain drew closer, I reflected upon Atara’s strange second name: Manslayer. I remembered Ravar once telling of a group of women warriors of the Sarni called the Manslayer Society. It was said that a few rare women from each tribe practiced at arms and gave up marriage in order to join the fearsome Manslayers. Membership in their Society was almost always for life, for the only way that a Manslayer could be released from her vows was to slay a hundred of her enemies. Atara, in having slain four before she reached this dreadful hill, had already accounted for more men than many Valari knights. And in sending on twelve more, with arrow and sword, she had accomplished a great if terrible feat.
I stood watching her in awe as she cleaned the blood from her arrows and dropped them down into the quiver slung over her back. I thought that she couldn’t be much older than I. She was a tall woman and big-boned, like most of her people. And she had their barbaric look. Her leather armor – all black and hardened and studded with steel–covered only her torso. A smoother and more supple pair of leather trousers provided protection for her legs. Her long, lithe arms were naked and burnt brown by the sun. Golden armlets encircled the upper parts of them. A golden torque, inlaid with lapis, encircled her neck. Her hair was like beaten gold, and the ends of it were wrapped with strings of tiny lapis beads. But it was her eyes that kept capturing my gaze; I had never hoped to see eyes like hers in all the world. Like sapphires her eyes were, like blue diamonds or the brightest of lapis. They sparkled with a rare spirit, and I thought they were more precious than any gem.
Just then, Maram and Master Juwain rode up to us, and Maram said, ‘Oh, my Lord – it really is a woman!’
‘A woman, yes,’ I said to him. I was instantly jealous of the intense interest he showed in her. ‘May I present Atara Manslayer of the Kurmak tribe? And this is Prince Maram Marshayk of Delu.’
I presented Master Juwain as well, and Atara greeted them politely before returning to the bloody work of retrieving her arrows. Both Master Juwain and Maram, as did I, wanted to know how a lone woman had come to be trapped on this hill. But Atara cut short their questions with an imperious shake of her head. She pointed to the top of the hill where her horse lay moaning, and she said, ‘Excuse me, but I have one more thing to attend to.’
We followed her up the hill, but when we saw what she intended, we stood off a few yards to give her a bit of privacy. She walked straight up to her horse, a young steppe pony whose belly had been cut open. Much of his insides had spilled out of him and lay steaming on the grass. She sat down on the grass beside him; gently, she lifted his head onto her lap. She began stroking the side of it as she sang out a sad little song and looked into his large dark eye. She stroked his long neck, and then – even as I turned Altaru facing downhill – she drew the edge of her saber across his throat, almost more quickly than I could believe.
For a while Atara sat there on the reddening grass and stared up at the sky. Her struggle between pride of decorum and her grief touched me keenly. And then, at last, she buried her face in her horse’s fur and began weeping softly. I blinked as I fought to keep from weeping as well.
After a while, she stood up and came over to us. Her hands and trousers were as bloody as a butcher’s but she paid them no heed. She pointed at the bodies of the hill-men and said, ‘They accosted me in the woods as I was climbing the hill. They demanded that I pay a toll for crossing their country. Their country, hmmph. I told them all this land belonged to King Kiritan, not them.’
‘What else could you do?’ Maram asked understandably. “Who has gold for tolls?’
Here Atara moved back to her horse, where she freed a purse from his saddlebag. As she weighed it in her hand, it jangled with coins, and she said, ‘It’s not gold I lack – only a willingness to enrich robbers.’
‘But they might have killed you!’ Maram said.
‘Better death than the dishonor of doing business with such men.’
Maram stared at her as if this principle were utterly alien to him.
‘When the hill-men saw that I wouldn’t pay them,’ Atara continued, ‘they became angry and raised weapons to me. They told me that they would take from me much more than a toll. One of them cut my pony with an axe to keep me from riding away. My pony! On the Wendrush, anyone who intentionally wounds a warrior’s pony in battle is staked out in the grass for the wolves.’
At this, Maram shook his head sadly and muttered, ‘Well, better the wolves than the bears.’
It was a measure of Atara’s wit – and grace – that she could laugh at this grim humor that she couldn’t be expected to appreciate. But laugh she did, showing her straight white teeth as her face widened with a grim smile.
‘But why were you even in the hill-men’s country?’ I asked her. I thought it more than strange that we should meet in the middle of this wilderness. ‘And why were you climbing this hill?’
Atara pointed to the hill’s ragged, rocky crest above us and said, ‘I thought I might be able to see the Nar Road from here.’
We looked at each other in immediate understanding. I admitted that I needed to be in Tria on the seventh day of Soldru to answer King Kiritan’s call to find the Lightstone. As did Atara. She told us of her journey then. She said that when word of the great quest had reached the Kurmak tribe, she had bade her people farewell and had ridden north along the western side of the Shoshan Mountains. Only by keeping close to these great peaks had she been able to bypass the Long Wall, which ran for four hundred miles across the prairies from the Shoshan to the Blue Mountains. Thus had Alonia protected its rich lands from the Sarni hordes for three long ages. But the Wall couldn’t keep out one lone warrior determined to find a way around it. On Citadel Mountain, where the stones of the Wall flowed almost seamlessly into the blue granite of the Shoshan, Atara had discovered a track leading around it through the woods. Her nimble steppe pony had found footing on this rocky track where a larger horse such as Altaru would have broken his legs. And so Alonia, as in times past, had been invaded by the Sarni–if only a single warrior of the Manslayer Society.
‘But the Sarni aren’t at war with Alonia, are they?’ I asked her. ‘Why didn’t you just pass the Wall through one of its gates?’
Atara looked at me strangely, and I felt her temper begin to rise. And then she said, ‘No, there’s no war, not yet. Other warriors, all men, have taken the more direct route along the Poru toward Tria. But the Alonians won’t allow one such as I to pass through their gates.’
And so, she said, she had ridden north from the Wall into the hills west of the gap in the Shoshan Mountains. Even as we had ridden into them, from a different direction.
‘I had hoped to cut the road by now,’ she said. ‘It can’t be far.’
‘You didn’t see it from the top of the hill?’ Maram asked worriedly.
‘No, I didn’t have time to look. But why don’t we look now?’
Together, we walked the twenty yards to the hill’s very top. As I had thought, the ground dropped off suddenly in a cliff as if a giant axe had chopped off the entire north part of the hill. From the exposed rocks along the line of this fault, we stood to look out. Forty or fifty miles away, the northern spur of the Shoshan Mountains was buried in the clouds. A cottony mis
t lay over the hill country leading up to them. We couldn’t see much more of it than humps of green sticking out above the silvery swirls. But just below us, in a little valley, a blue-gray band of rock cut through the trees. It was wider than any road I had ever seen, and I knew that it must be the ancient Nar Road, which had been built from Tria to Nar before even the Age of Swords.
The question now arose as to what we should do. Maram, of course, favored the familiarity of good paving stones beneath his feet while I might have preferred to keep to the woods. I felt safer beneath the crowns of the great oaks than in proceeding along the line of an open road. But Master Juwain observed that if the hill-men were bent upon revenge, they could fall upon us anywhere in these hills that they chose. Therefore, he said, we might as well make our way down to the road. Atara agreed with him. And then she added that the hill-men were unlikely to attack us after losing so many men–especially since the arms of a Valari knight had now been added to the power of her great bow.
‘But what about my bow?’ Maram protested. He held up my hunting bow as if it belonged to him. ‘It was my arrow, was it not, that finally frightened the men away?’
Atara looked down the hill to where Maram’s arrow still stuck out of the grass. She said, ‘Oh, you’re right–what a magnificent shot! You probably managed to kill a mole or at least a few earthworms.’
I tried not to smile as Maram’s face flushed beet red. And it was good that I didn’t, for Atara had her doubts about me as well.
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 24
