The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom

by David Zindell

  I went on to speak of the necessity of opposing Morjin so that he didn’t make all men slaves. Recovering the Lightstone, I told him, was the key to everything. I tried to find clever words to persuade him. Without consciously wielding the sword of valarda that Morjin had told of, I opened my heart to him. But it seemed that it wasn’t enough.

  ‘There are other ships in Ivalo,’ he informed us coldly. ‘Perhaps one of them will take you where you wish to go.’

  And with that he handed back the purse and stormed off toward his cabin.

  After his men had gone back to their duties, Maram said, ‘Well, he’s right that we’ll find other ships and captains in Ivalo, isn’t he?’

  ‘So, we will,’ Kane muttered. ‘Pirates and war galleys and other merchantmen less principled than he.’

  ‘Principled?’ I said, looking at Kane.

  ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘Captain Kharald has a keen sense of what he requires for our passage. He won’t be swayed by any argument or threat.’

  ‘Well,’ Master Juwain observed, ‘it’s all very good to have principles, of course. But there are higher ones to live by.’

  Maram nodded his head at this. ‘Perhaps we weren’t prepared to give everything, then. Perhaps we should have offered him one of our gelstei.’

  Kane nodded toward the inner pocket of Maram’s red tunic where he usually secreted his firestone. And then he said, ‘Ha, I suppose you’re willing to be the first to give up yours?’

  Beneath the heat of Kane’s blistering gaze, Maram flushed with shame as he slowly shook his head.

  ‘I can’t believe,’ Liljana said, ‘that we gained the gelstei only to use them to buy passage on a ship.’

  We all agreed. But none of us could think of a way to persuade Captain Kharald to take us to the Island of the Swans.

  ‘What are we to do then?’ Maram asked.

  And Kane said, ‘So, we’ll wait. Tomorrow we’ll reach Ivalo. And there we’ll have to find another ship.’

  But this prospect discouraged us all, for we had come to have a strange trust in Captain Kharald and the Snowy Owl. That night, after dinner, we sat on her deck looking out on the stars in a deep melancholy. The cool, groaning wind off the lapping waves carried murmurs of lamentation from distant corners of the world. Even the waning moon seemed saddened to lose slivers of itself night after night.

  Alphanderry, pulled by the great weight of this pale orb, took out his mandolet and began to sing. At first his words were of that impossible language it seemed no man could ever understand. There was a great pain in the sounds that poured from his throat but a great beauty, too. I had never heard him sing so well. Perhaps, I thought, his song had been made purer and clearer by listening to that of the whales. Even Flick seemed to apprehend this new quality of Alphanderry’s music, for he hovered just above him and flared up like a cluster of shooting stars with every note.

  Captain Kharald’s men gathered around us then to listen to Alphanderry play his mandolet. I knew that they had never heard anything like it before. Then Captain Kharald came out of his cabin and stood staring at Alphanderry as if seeing him for the first time.

  After Alphanderry had finally finished his song, he looked up and realized that he had an audience. ‘Hoy,’ he said, ‘I’m getting closer, I think. Maybe someday, maybe someday.’

  ‘What was that song?’ lonald asked in a rough voice. ‘I couldn’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘I’m not sure I could either,’ Alphanderry said, laughing along with Jonald and the other sailors.

  ‘Well, do you know any songs we can understand?’ Jonald asked.

  ‘I don’t know – what would you like to hear?’

  It startled me when Captain Kharald suddenly stepped forward and said, ‘What about The Pilot King?’ That’s a good song for a night such as this.’

  Alphanderry nodded his head agreeably and began tuning his mandolet. Then he smiled at Captain Kharald as he began to play:

  A king there was in Thaluvale,

  His name was Koru-Ki,

  He built a silver ship to sail

  The heavens’ starry sea.

  It was a sad song, full of wild longing and great deeds; it told of how King Koru-Ki, in the Age of Law, had sailed out from Thalu in search of the streaming lights of the Northern Passage, which was said to lead off the edge of the world up to the stars. It was a long song, too, and Alphanderry played for a long time. The moon was high in the sky by the time he finished.

  ‘Thank you,’ Captain Kharald told him politely. His men began drifting off, to their duties or beds. But he stood there a long while staring at Alphanderry strangely. ‘Thank you, minstrel. If I had known you had such a voice, I wouldn’t have let King Vakurun pay your passage.’

  Then he, too, went off to bed and so did we.

  We reached Ivalo late the next morning. We caught our first sight of it just as we rounded a hump of land along Eanna’s northern coast. Like Varkall or Tria, it was a river city, built at the mouth of the Rune. But it had none of Tria’s splendor and too much of Varkall’s squalor. Too many of its houses and buildings were of wood and seemed jammed together in dirty, fetid districts that crowded the river. Unlike ancient Imatru a hundred miles farther up the Rune, it was a new city, scarcely a thousand years old. No great towers graced the muddy banks upon which it was sited. No gleaming bridges of living stone spanned the muddy Rune. Neither were there walls to catch the light of the midday sun. The Eannans, who were perhaps the greatest mariners in the world, liked to say that they were better protected with wooden walls, and these were their ships.

  Many of them were docked in the harbor into which we sailed. We saw luggers and whalers, barks and bilanders – and, of course, the galliots and warships of the Eannan fleet. These were all lined up along the docks jutting out from the Rune’s western bank. The eastern bank was given over to Ivalo’s many warehouses and shipyards – and taverns and inns that served its sailors.

  Here the Snowy Owl found berth along a wharf owned by one of Captain Kharald’s friends. We tied up across the way from another bilander, commanded by a Surrapamer named Captain Toman. Both he and Captain Kharald were old friends. Like Captain Kharald, he was a thickset man with a shock of fiery hair – though his beard had gone gray. When he saw the Snowy Owl strike her sails, he came on board and greeted Jonald and others whom he knew. Then Captain Kharald showed him into his cabin so that they might drink a bit of brandy and speak of their homeland.

  ‘Well,’ I said to Kane, ‘we’d better get the horses off and find ourselves another ship.’

  We went down into the hold to attend to this task. Altaru and the other horses had fleshed out nicely during the voyage. They seemed only too happy to remain in their stalls and continue feasting on oats. If any of them had suffered from sea-sickness, they gave no sign.

  Just as I was leading Altaru onto the deck, Captain Kharald came out of his cabin and walked over to me. He waited until my companions and their horses had joined me, and then astonished us all, saying, ‘If it’s still your wish to sail to the Island of the Swans, I’ll take you there.’

  ‘It is still our wish,’ I said, speaking for my friends. ‘But why this change of heart?’

  Captain Kharald’s face fell angry and sad. He said, ‘I’ve had bad news from Surrapam. The Hesperuks have broken the line of the Maron and are laying waste the countryside. There is much hunger in my homeland. I’ve decided to take on a cargo of grain and sail for Artram as soon as we’re loaded. I’m willing to put in to the Island of the Swans along the way.’

  ‘So, you’re willing, and we’re all glad for that,’ Kane said. ‘But willing at what price?’

  ‘The Princess’ purse will be enough,’ Captain Kharald told us. He pointed at Atara’s medallion and then looked at my ring. ‘These other things are dear to you, and you should keep them.’

  I could not quite believe what I was hearing. I thanked Captain Kharald and smiled as Atara hurried to hand him her purs
e before he changed his mind again.

  ‘Now I must excuse myself,’ Captain Kharald said as he tucked the clinking coins into his pocket. ‘There’s much to do before we sail.’

  He walked off toward the stern and left us there with our nickering horses and our confusion.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Maram said, watching the sailors and wharf hands swarm the deck in preparation for unloading and loading cargo.

  And then Master Juwain explained: ‘Their whole lives, men fight battles inside themselves. And sometimes, in a moment, the battle is suddenly won.’

  After that, we took the horses down to the wharf and led them through Ivalo’s noisome streets to give them some exercise. We spent the day wandering about the waterfront districts, trying to keep out of the way of the throngs of people who crowded by us. The Eannans, I saw, were a mixed people: many showed hair as red as Captain Kharald’s while many more were fair-skinned blonds who must have traced their ancestry to the Aryans who had conquered this kingdom so long ago. There were women and men who had the brown hair and darker complexions of the Delians, even as did Maram, and more than a few bearing the lineaments of the Hesperuk race, with their mahogany skins and long, black curls. We tried to avoid them all. We kept our hoods close to our faces and kept to our business as well. For Eanna, as we had been told, was a land of assassins and spies, plots and usurpations. Here Morjin had great strength in the Kallimun priests who were said to have established themselves in secret citadels and even within the palace of old King Hanniban himself.

  Late that afternoon, on a low hill about a mile from the shipyards, we found ourselves on a narrow lane called the Street of Swords. I visited the various smithies and shops there hoping to find a blade to replace the one I had broken. But the swords I saw were of poor quality, and I wouldn’t consent to trade my medallion for any of them, even though I longed to fill up my scabbard with a length of good steel again. I resigned myself to practicing with the wooden sword I had whittled. It wouldn’t do for battle, of course, but at least I could keep my skills sharp until I found something better.

  We returned to the ship before dark, and there we waited for its bales of sealskins and barrels of whale oil to be unloaded and great canvas bags of wheat berries taken on. This took the wharf hands most of three days. When the holds were finally full again, Captain Kharald walked the decks inspecting the rigging and the balance of the ship. And then, on the tide, we sailed for Surrapam by way of the Island of the Swans.

  The first hundred miles of our voyage were easy enough, with fair skies and good wind. On the following day, however, as we rounded the Cape of Storms at the very northwest corner of the continent, the seas grew much rougher. The skies darkened, too, though strangely there was no rain. With the great island of Thalu ahead of us somewhere to the west, we sailed south, into the Dragon Channel.

  Here the wine-dark waters pitched the Snowy Owl up and down as if testing her timbers and the skills of those who sailed her. These, as I saw, were as great in their own way as any of my brothers’ prowess with arms. Captain Kharald came alive with the rising of the wind and seas; often he stood near the bow grinning fiercely with his red hair blowing back behind him. At the sharp commands he barked out above the ocean’s roar, Jonald and the other sailors turned the ship back and forth against the wind and made progress across the waves even so. The magic of this maneuver amazed me; Captain Kharald called it tacking. We spent most of the next three days tacking back and forth along a line leading mostly south toward Surrapam.

  On our fifth day out from Ivalo, we came upon a sight that chagrined us all: this was the wreckage of a merchantman listing badly and dead in the water. As we drew closer to this stricken ship, however, we saw that it had not run aground on the numerous rocks and reefs off Thalu as Captain Kharald first supposed. Fire had taken her to her doom: the shreds of blackened sails still hanging from her spars and the charred wood there gave sign of this. There was also much sign of battle. Black arrows stuck from the masts like a porcupine’s quills, and the hacked corpses of many sailors lay about the bloodstained deck. The terrible stench issuing from this death ship told us that none had survived this devastation. Captain Kharald wanted to board her to make sure this was so, but the rough seas about us prevented any such maneuver.

  ‘Who do you think did this?’ Maram asked him as everyone gathered along the Snowy Owl’s port side to look at this ship.

  ‘Pirates, likely,’ Captain Kharald said. ‘There are many pirate enclaves on Thalu.’

  Maram shuddered at this and muttered that nothing could be worse than such lawless, marauding men. And then the sea turned the black ship slowly about, and what we saw told of something much worse. For there, nailed to the main mast, hung the burned and tormented body of a man.

  ‘So, I’ve heard the Thalunes are without mercy,’ Kane said. ‘But I’ve never heard that they are crucifiers.’

  ‘No, they’re not,’ Captain Kharald admitted. ‘This is certainly the work of a Hesperuk warship. It’s said the Hesperuks have taken to crucifying in the Red Dragon’s name.’

  ‘They’ll crucify us if they catch us carrying wheat to Surrapam,’ one of Captain Kharald’s men said. ‘Or feed us to the sharks.’

  After that, Captain Kharald gave orders for an extra sailor to go aloft and stand watch on the crow’s nest high on the foremast. We all cast nervous looks about the gray ocean as the wind drove the Snowy Owl ever further south and we left the death ship behind us.

  But it is one thing to sail away from such sights on a fleet ship built of stout oak; it is quite another to leave them behind in one’s soul. That night, terrible dreams nailed me to the deck of the ship. For what seemed hours, I tried to shield myself from Morjin’s fell, whispered words that burned me like the breath of a dragon. It took all my will finally to fight myself awake. I sat up trembling and sweating and peering through the darkness for any sign of land. And wordlessly, whisperlessly, Atara came over to touch a dry cloth to my face.

  ‘Here,’ she said after a while, wiping my forehead, ‘you were dreaming again.’

  ‘Yes, dreaming,’ I said.

  The sea beneath us swelled and fell as the ship’s wooden joints moaned like an old man. The wind off the cold water suddenly chilled me to the bone. It seemed that I could still smell the stench of the blackened ship we had passed.

  ‘Of what were your dreams?’ Atara asked me.

  I looked at Maram snoring on top of his furs nearby and our other companions stretched out peacefully on the deck. And I said, ‘Death. My dreams were of death.’

  A terrible sadness fell over her then. She sat down facing me and wrapped her arms around my sweat-soaked back. She held me tightly against her warm body as she began weeping softly. And then, through her tears, she murmured, ‘No, no, you can’t die. You mustn’t. You mustn’t – don’t you see?’

  ‘See what, Atara?’

  ‘That if you died, I’d want to die, too.’

  For a long time she sat there kissing the tears from my own eyes as she stroked my hair. And then, to further comfort me, she said, ‘Surely the Lightstone can take away any such dreams.’

  ‘The Lightstone,’ I said. ‘Have you seen it, then?’

  ‘No, I think Mithuna was right,’ she told me. ‘No scryer can ever behold it. But I know we’re getting close to it, Val. We must be.’

  I prayed that what she said must be true. As I held her against me, I looked over her shoulder, out into the darkness of the sea. And there, many miles to the south, beyond the black and rolling waves, I thought I saw a bit of golden light breaking through the clouds and drawing us on.

  The next morning at sunrise, the lookout in the crow’s nest called out that he had sighted the distant rocks of the Island of the Swans.

  27

  It was nearly noon by the time we had sailed close enough to the island to get a good look at it. This western part of the world was a realm of clouds and mists that lay low over the land and often obscure
d much of it. The rocks that the lookout had espied proved to be the highlands of four smaller islands just to the east of the Island of the Swans. The island itself, like a seahorse with its head pointed west and tail curling southeast, was a much greater prominence about fifty miles in length. Along its central spine, three conical mountains pushed their peaks toward the sky. From the centermost and tallest of these, it seemed that a great plume of smoke issued forth and fed the gray-black clouds above it. Captain Kharald’s men feared that this must be dragon smoke; they called for the Snowy Owl to flee these accursed waters before the dragon descended upon us in a flurry of leathery wings and burned us with his fire.

  ‘Dragons, hmmph,’ Atara said as we all stood near the rail looking at the island. ‘There hasn’t been a dragon in Ea for two thousand years.’

  ‘None but the Red Dragon,’ Master Juwain agreed. ‘And he has no power here.’

  I clenched my teeth as I remembered the last night’s dreams, but I said nothing.

  ‘No men, I think, have power over the Island of the Swans,’ Kane told us. ‘It’s said that men have never conquered it or made a kingdom here.’

  If true, I thought that was very strange. The Island of the Swans lay scarcely sixty miles across the Dragon Channel from Surrapam, and even less distance from Thalu to the north. And while the Surrapamers had never been conquerors like the Thalunes, they weren’t above grabbing bits of land to add to theirs like everyone else.

  ‘If there are no dragons here,’ Maram said, pointing at the smoking mountain, ‘then what curse lies upon this land?’

  None of us knew. Not even Captain Kharald could tell us why, for as long as anyone could remember, ships from Surrapam – as well as Eanna and Thalu – had avoided the Island of the Swans.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I heard one of his men grumble, ‘it’s because any ship that sails for this island never returns.’

  His fear spread to his shipmates from tongue to nervous tongue, and even Jonald seemed reluctant to steer the Snowy Owl any closer to the island. Captain Kharald, his face set as sternly as the rocks toward which we sailed, walked among his crew and met them with his steely eyes to give them courage. If any decided that this was no voyage for them, he wanted to remind them of their duty before they began talking of mutiny.