We gave them our names and those of our lands; we told them that we needed help in crossing the Ardellan so that we could continue on our journey. After conferring with his fellows for a moment, the captain looked at us with his icy blue eyes and said, ‘We know of Alonia and the Elyssu, but there are no kingdoms called Mesh and Delu that we have ever heard.’
‘So, it’s a big world,’ Kane growled at him as he tossed a little stone against the gate. ‘If you’ll let us in, we’ll tell you more about it.’
‘The King will decide that,’ the guard captain said. ‘You’ll wait here while he is summoned.’
As if to give more weight to his command, the other guards suddenly produced crossbows and aimed them at us. But the iron of their mechanisms seemed worn away, and I doubted if they would fire.
‘What kind of king is it,’ Maram whispered to me, ‘who is summoned to greet us rather than we to him?’
For a while, as we sat on our horses and listened to the wind rattling across the potato fields surrounding the city, we awaited the answer to this question. And then we heard heavy steps behind the rickety old wall as of boots treading up wooden stairs. An old man suddenly showed his white-haired head and wispy white beard. I saw that he must have once been quite tall but was now stooped with age. He wore a faded purple mande collared with white ermine that had seen better days. Upon his head was a silver crown that seemed to have been hastily polished in a vain effort to rub the tarnish away. The guard captain presented him as King Vakurun. The King looked down upon us with rheumy blue eyes that held no welcome but a great deal of fear.
‘Tell us your names again,’ he commanded us in a quavering voice. ‘Speak up so that we can hear you.’
Again, we gave our names and waited for the gates to be opened.
‘How do we know you are who you say?’ he asked us.
‘Who else could we be?’ I replied.
King Vakurun traded a quick look with his captain, then pointed at the trees beyond the fields. ‘Only evil things have ever come out of those woods.’
I smiled at Atara and Alphanderry, then called out, ‘Do we look evil to you?’
‘That which has slain my people,’ he told us as he pointed his old finger at Atara, ‘is said sometimes to appear as fair as this maiden.’
He went on to say that his realm had been attacked by a succession of enemies: great black bears deeper in the woods; an invincible knight mounted on a great white horse armored in diamonds; a tribe of warrior women; giant men with hideous faces and white fur; long, leechlike worms as big as whales – and other things.
Now it was my turn to trade looks with Kane and the others. Then I looked up at the King and said, ‘It would seem that all these enemies were really one enemy. And he has been slain.’
We told of our passage through the Vardaloon and of Meliadus. We assured him that we had put this monster in the earth, from which he would never rise again. Then we told him about the quest and showed him the medallions that King Kiritan had given us.
‘We have heard of King Kiritan,’ King Vakurun said. The sunlight off the circles of gold we wore around our necks seemed to dazzle his eyes. ‘And we have heard that he sent emissaries to all lands to call knights to Tria, though he never sent anyone to our realm.’
His hand swept out toward the fields around his rotting old town.
‘And what realm is that?’ I asked him.
‘Why, Valdalon,’ the King said. ‘You’re in Valdalon, didn’t you know?’
He went on to say that he ruled all the lands from Eanna to the Blue Mountains and between the White Mountains and the sea.
‘If you really did slay this Meliadus,’ he told us, ‘then we owe you a debt that must be repaid.’
I looked at the points of his crown and saw that the squares of amethyst there had fallen off two of them. I said, ‘We ask only a safe passage through your kingdom and help crossing the river, if you can provide it.’
I admitted that we were on our way to Ivalo, where we hoped to find a ship that would take us across the sea to the islands south of Thalu.
‘If it’s a ship you seek,’ the King said, ‘then perhaps we can help you cross much more than the river. There are two ships in our harbor, and one of them is due to sail for Ivalo this very day.’
This news sent a stir of excitement through us, especially Maram who had dreaded the hard work of chopping down trees to build a raft – to say nothing of riding hundreds of miles to Ivalo. After our various travails, we seemed to have been favored with a stroke of good fortune.
King Vakurun called for the gates to be opened then, and we rode into the city – if this assemblage of miserable houses and muddy streets could so be called. Forty of the King’s men immediately surrounded us to act as an escort; none of these ‘knights,’ however, was mounted. It seemed that the King himself possessed the only horse in the city. He pulled himself on top of this sway-backed old gelding, then rode beside me as we made our way through the streets toward the river.
‘We’ll have to hurry if we wish to catch this ship,’ he told us. ‘It might be a long while before another sails for the west.’
With a sad look then, he recounted the story of his people. Many of these lined the streets to witness the unprecedented spectacle we must have provided them. All except the graybeards and crones had the same blond hair and blue eyes as our guards. All looked as if they might have been Atara’s distant cousins – which indeed they proved to be.
The Valdalonians, King Vakurun said, were descendants of a great warrior named Tarnaran and his followers, who had set out from Thalu some three hundred years before. Tarnaran and his band of adventurers – these were not the King’s words but only my understanding of them – claimed the great Bohimir as their ancestor. Dreaming as they did of regaining the glory of the ancient Aryans, they sought new lands to conquer. But Tarnaran was no Bohimir, and Thalu was long past its time of greatness. There was to be no sailing of the Thousand Ships or sack of Tria by bloodthirsty savages in this age. Five ships only Tarnaran gathered along the coast of the impoverished Thalu. He led them across the Great Northern Ocean and into the mouth of the Ardellan River. There they built their first city, and Tarnaran was crowned King of Valdalon.
But it was one thing to claim all the land from Eanna to the Blue Mountains, and quite another to subdue it. King Tarnaran had found it easy enough to cow the tribespeople along the coast into paying him a tribute of fish and furs; the tribes of the deeper forest proved more formidable. As did the forest itself. It took the Valdalonians a hundred years to establish towns farther inland along the Ardellan and its tributaries. Fighting the leeches and mosquitoes and thick walls of vegetation was bad enough. But as they tried to extend their power even further through their realm, they were assaulted and killed by the succession of enemies that King Vakurun had told of earlier.
‘You can’t begin to understand the terror this Meliadus caused my people,’ King Vakurun told us. ‘If it truly was this beast-man who slayed them.’
Meliadus, the King said, had slain much more than the Valdalonians. Over the second century of their rule, the tribes of the deeper woods began dying, followed by those of the coast. With no one left to pay them tribute, King Vakurun’s people grew poorer. Then, one by one, their outposts in the forest came under assault. Dreadful tales were told: of a young warrior whose wife turned into a she-bear and devoured him; of children who had been stolen from their beds and later found drained of every ounce of blood. The third century of the Valdalonians’ rule saw the gradual abandonment of towns along the Ardellan and the realm’s other rivers. By the time of King Vakurun’s father, King Vakurun said, his people had been reduced to eking out a living behind the walls of their original city.
‘These have been bad times, the worst of times,’ the King told us as we rode toward the river. ‘But it’s said that it’s always darkest before the dawn. I pray that you’ll find this Lightstone that you seek. As I do that my people will someda
y fill all of Valdalon from the White Mountains to the sea.’
His people, I thought, could barely fill the single city that remained to them. Many of the houses about us seemed abandoned or had even fallen in upon themselves. Aside from the few crops the Valdalonians pulled from the poor, sandy soil around their city and the hunting of the fur seals farther along the coast, they had little to sustain themselves. And so King Vakurun, early in his reign, had built a harbor in the hope of attracting the great ships that sailed the ocean to the south of the Elyssu and Nedu. From the pines that grew so abundantly nearby, his people had pressed forth pitch and turpentine with which to repair these ships. Thus they had been reduced from warriors to being caulkers and carpenters.
The two ships that he had told us about were still anchored at the harbor along the river’s edge. Of course, to call four rickety docks sticking out into the river a harbor was something like calling a molehill a mountain. Still, I thought, the ships were impressive enough. One was a galliot being fitted with new oars while the other Master Juwain called a bilander. This stout, two-masted ship had pulled into the harbor to take on a cargo of furs and was bound for Ivalo.
We rode our horses right down onto the dock to which it was tied. Then King Vakurun called for the captain to come down the gangplank and meet us. The dozen sailors who had stopped their work to look at us made way for him. Captain Kharald, as the King presented him, was a burly man dressed like the men he commanded in a wool shirt, wide black belt and bright blue pantaloons. He had the flaming red hair of a Surrapamer and eyes as green as the sea. His face, burnt red from years of sun and wind, was creased with many lines like an old piece of leather. When he saw that the King intended us to take passage with him, it lit up with greed.
‘Well, it’s a clear hundred and fifty leagues from here to Ivalo,’ he said, looking us over. ‘And there are seven of you and eleven horses, two of them heavily laden.’
The captain, I thought, was a man who liked numbers and sums – and calculating profit to the thinnest piece of silver.
Atara started to draw forth the leather purse of coins that she had won at dice in Tria. But King Vakurun stayed her hand with an unexpectedly regal look. To Captain Kharald, he said, ‘These people have done us a great service, and it is our wish that they should have passage to wherever they wish. You may take the cost of this from the price of the furs that we have agreed upon.’
I started to protest this largesse, but a look from Liljana silenced me. I saw what she saw: that a king, to be a king, needed opportunities to display his generosity. I saw another thing as well. King Vakurun, it seemed, was only too happy to rid his realm of seven strangers who might prove to be even more dangerous than Meliadus.
After that, we thanked the King and set about boarding the ship. As I had feared, there was some trouble getting the horses up the gangplank and then down into the stables in the ship’s hold. Altaru, especially, did not want to be taken down into this dank, darkish place. Three of the sailors assured me that they had shipped horses before, and tried to take his reins from me. This was a mistake. Altaru kicked out at them, missing their heads by inches and almost splintering the topsides above the deck. Captain Kharald’s green eyes blazed like a dragon’s as he inspected the divots that Altaru’s iron-shod hooves had left in the wood. He said nothing, but I could almost hear him tallying up the damage and subtracting it from the price of the furs he would pay to King Vakurun.
Finally, I took it upon myself to lead Altaru down the walkway into the hold. Atara and the others did the same with their horses. After making sure that their stables were clean and spread with fresh straw, we fed them oats from the ship’s store and then went up to lay out our sleeping furs on the deck.
An hour later, with the ebbing of the tide and the night’s first stars pointing our way west, the ship sailed out from the mouth of the Ardellan River into the Great Northern Ocean.
26
There was a full moon that night, and it rose over a world that was nothing but water in all directions. Long past the time that I should have been sleeping with my companions back near the stern, I stood alone at the bow gripping the railing there as I watched the ship splitting the waves of the moon-silvered sea. Sailing out of sight of the land terrified me. Merely looking out at the ocean threatened to drown me in its bright black vastness. To the south and west, east and north, I saw no bit of land upon which I could fix my gaze or hope of setting foot should a sudden storm take us under. My life, I realized, and those of my companions and everyone else aboard, was utterly tied to the fate of this rolling and pitching clump of wood that men had nailed together.
Captain Kharald had named his ship the Snowy Owl, and this gave me at least a little courage. Owls can see through the darkness, as could our red-bearded captain. He walked the deck for hours that first night of our voyage, now casting his eyes up at the wind-filled sails, now checking with the pilot who steered the ship to make sure that we held our course. This, I thought, he set by the stars. They were very bright that night. These millions of points of light streaked out of the black sky like diamond-tipped spears and almost outshone the moon itself. At no time in my life since I had climbed the mountains of my home had I felt so close to them.
I might have remained there all night gazing out into this unnerving splendor and smelling the salty spray of the sea. But then I heard steps behind me, and turned expecting to see Captain Kharald or one of his crew of fifty sailors who worked the ship. Instead, a stranger stood limned in the moonlight. Or so I thought at first, for he wore neither the rough, wool shirt or pantaloons of Captain Kharald’s men but rather a long traveling cloak with a deep hood that covered most of his face. And then he spoke, and I knew he was no stranger.
‘Valashu Elahad,’ he said, ‘why are you trying to run from me?’
His voice was sweeter than Alphanderry’s; when he threw back his hood, the moon’s light fell across the most beautiful face I had ever seen. His hair gleamed like gold, and his eyes were like twin suns pouring a golden light into the darkness. Across the chest of his tunic, which was trimmed with black fur, there coiled a great, red dragon.
I tried not to look at him, but it seemed that my eyelids were pinned open as with nails. I tried not to listen to him, but his voice rose above the creaking of the ship’s timbers and the howling wind: ‘I know you murdered my son.’
I started to deny this, but then remembered that I mustn’t speak to him at any cost.
Morjin then reached out his finely made hand and touched the scabbard where my broken sword was sheathed. He said, ‘I told you that you would slay with this sword again, and so you have.’
‘No,’ I whispered, ‘it was he who –’
‘MY SON!’ Morjin suddenly roared at me. So great was this shout that I thought the force of it might crack the ship’s masts. And so terrible was the anguish in Morjin’s voice that I was afraid it might crack me apart.
‘My son,’ Morjin said in softer tones that slid into me like silken knives. ‘My only son.’
I threw my hands up over my ears to shut out his words. Finally, I managed to close my eyes and blind myself to the immense suffering I saw on his face.
But then Morjin touched my hands with his hands; he touched my forehead, pressing his finger against the scar there. And I heard his voice pealing out like silver chimes inside my mind; I saw his eyes seeking me out and looking where no man should look.
‘The last time we met,’ he said, ‘we agreed that you must die. But now that you have murdered Meliadus, you must die a thousand times. Shall I show you these deaths?’
Without waiting for me to answer, his hand lashed out, catching me full in the chest. The force of this blow was so great that it propelled me over the railing, and I fell through black space. And then I plunged into the even vaster blackness of the sea. I sank into the churning waves like a stone. I gasped for air, choked, breathed water. The salt burned my lungs even as the cold took me deeper and crushed the life f
rom me.
And then the darkness of the sea gave way to a stinging glister, and I realized that I was not falling into its depths after all but rather caught in the cleft between two mountains as a blizzard raged all about me. Still I struggled to breathe as the liquid wind froze my limbs and needles of ice pierced my flesh. The pain of it grew so great that I was sure that cold steel knives were tearing into me.
And then I was being torn open – with the shouts of fierce, blue-skinned warriors who had somehow surrounded me and forced me up against a mountain wall. Their gleaming axes beat aside my father’s shield and chopped through my armor into my belly. I opened my mouth to scream at the incredible agony of it all, but then another axe caught me in the face, and I had no mouth with which to utter any sound, not even the faintest whisper of how terrified I was of death.
And so it went. The Lord of Lies had promised me a thousand deaths. But as I stood there on the bow of the rolling ship with Morjin’s hand touching my forehead, it seemed that I died a thousand times a thousand times.
‘Do you see, Valashu?’ he said to me. ‘Do you see?’
For what seemed hours, as the moon dropped its chill radiance down upon us, I fought not to behold the terrible visions that Morjin gave me. But I didn’t fight hard enough. Not even the fierce will to battle that I had learned from Kane was enough to drive them or him away.
Finally, Morjin took his hand away from me. He stood beneath millions of stars hanging like knives above our heads. And in the saddest of voices, he said to me, ‘Now you have seen your fate. But know that there is one, and only one, who can change it. And only one way that I will be persuaded to let you live.’
So saying, he looked down at my hands, which I saw were grasping a plain golden cup. Before I could blink at my astonishment, he took this cup from me and held it so that I could look inside.
And there, in its shimmering depths that were deeper than the sea, I saw myself standing on top of the world’s highest mountain before a great, golden throne. Morjin, sitting on top of this throne, came down off it and extended his hand toward me. Then he pointed east and west, north and south, at Delu and Surrapam, at Sunguru and Alonia and all the other kingdoms of the world. All these, he said, he would give me to rule. He would give me Atara as my queen, and I would reign for a thousand years as Ea’s High King.
The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom Page 59
