That day I rode at the head of our three long columns, and Estrella rode beside me. She had a calm and gentle touch with her little gelding; I had never seen anyone learn a horse's ways so quickly. Riding in the open air seemed to please her immensely, as did the wind and sun and smell of the summer flowers in the rolling fields about us. Her. slender body was stronger than it looked. She had good stamina for continuing on mile after mile and taking only a few breaks, to water and feed the horses and to feed ourselves. Thirty miles we covered on that first day of our journey out from Nar and as many the next. The unaccustomed abrasion of sitting in a saddle all day must have pained her, but she made no complaint - neither with her ever-silent lips nor with her dark, expressive eyes. Often she would brush aside the soft curls from her face and look at me happily. She seemed always to want to be near me, to serve me, to remind me of the best parts ot myself. It made her happy to make me happy, and I loved her for that. And yet, beneath her radiant smiles and quicksilver expressions of delight, something dark and heavy seemed to pull at her heart like a great weight. I felt this most keenly on the evening of our third day of travel, when we reached Loviisa. We made camp by a stream in the hills overlooking the city; above us on the nearby hill loomed the old Aradar castle, abandoned when King Hadaru had built his wooden palace. As the sun set in the west beyond it, this huge pile of stone changed colors, from bone white to an almost glowing and blood-filled red. Estrella sat with me and my friends around our campfire, and she flitted about refilling my bowl with some succulent lamb stew and pouring water into my cup. And in the middle of tendering these little devotions, something about the castle caught her eye. She froze like a fawn caught in a snow tiger's icy stare. As she stared at the castle's keep, at its flaming western wall, fear rushed through her little chest like poison, and her bright and dreamy face fell ashen with nightmare. She began shivering violently. Was she recalling the murder of her sister servants in my father's castle and her helplessness at being trapped outside on its pitch-black wall? Or was she reliving some hideous torment visited upon her in Argattha? She couldn't tell me. All I could do was to cover her with my cloak and hold her next to me until this evil spell had passed. But the immense sorrow that welled up out of her was too much for me to bear. It was like listening to the cries of a million children who had lost their mothers. I found myself suddenly bowing down my head and weeping into Estrella's thick hair even as she broke open and wept as well.
Later, after Behira had taken her off to bed, I walked alone up toward the castle. I stood beneath its towering battlements and looked up at the stars. Why, 1 wondered, were there so many black spaces between these brilliant islands of light? Why must darkness descend every night upon the world, and inevitably, upon men's souls? Was there no help for suffering, then? Men called me the Maitreya, but the cold wind falling down from the sky made me shiver and doubt this, for I couldn't even ease the anguish of a single little girl. As the wolves howled in the hills around me, I wanted to throw back my head and howl, too: at the lights in the heavens, at the pain of the world, at the fire that ignited inside me and made me burn for deeper life.
The next day wag one of bright sun and skies as clear and blue as sapphire. Our way for the next forty or fifty miles, until we reached the mountains, was through a rolling and gradually rising country of rich farms and even richer pastures where countless sheep covered the green hillsides like blankets of white wool. No good roads led to this way, only dirt tracks winding around wheatfields and occasionally cutting straight through acres of rye or barley. The Gaurdians, however had no trouble negotiating such terrain. Upon abandoning our baggage train in Loviisa, we moved even morequickly and easily, though along
somewhat less straight a path. In many places, our three columns had to be consolidated to two or even to one, a single long line of Valari knights strung out like glittering diamonds on a necklace. Late that morning Maram suggested that we ride together behind the rear of the columns so that we might have a space to talk. 'You take too much to heart,' he said to me.
'No in truth, too little.'
'You can't help what you can't help, Val.'
'But it must be helped,' I said. 'Everything must be.'
'But the world is the way it is. The way the One made it to be.'
I thought about this as I tried not to choke on the dust that the hundreds of horses ahead of us kicked up into the air. I thought of the letter Salmelu had delivered to me, and I said, 'Sometimes it seems that Morjin was right, after all.'
Maram always seemed to know what I was thinking. he asked, 'Do you mean, that we should hate the One? Do you. . . hate, then?'
'Sometimes. I almost do,' I said. 'When I remember Khaisham, when I think of Atara. And now, when Estrella can't even tell me what she suffers.'
'Morjin wrote that such suffering ultimately leads to our salvation - as I remember, through torturing innocents and rising above them.'
'Yes, and there he errs. In this lies much of his evil. But he is surely right that we were meant to rise, to be as angels. The world it the way the One made it to be, you say. And so are we. Surely the One made us to make a better world.'
'Well ending war is one thing. But you can't end suffering itself.'
'Perhaps not. But what is the meaning of the Maitreya, then? What would the meaning of my life be if I didn't at least try?'
For much of the morning, as we rode through the pretty country of Ishka. we discussed the prophecies about the Maitreya recorded in the Saganom Elu and Master Juwain's hope of discovering much more to the akashic crystal. By noon we had put ten miles behind us, and by the end of the day, another ten. When we made camp in a fallow field that evening, our talk finally turned to more immediate things: to the fine weather we were enjoying; to the high spirits of the knights of eight kingdoms riding as brothers; to the lofty, white peaks of the Morning Mountains rising up before us to the west. As always, Maram feared encountering bears in these wooded heights, His fear increased mile after mile the following day and did not abate, not even when we began digging the fortifications for our nightly camp in the forest below Ishka's largest lake. For he remembered that just to the north of this lake lay the Black Bog.
'There are worse things than bears there,' he said. 'Dark creatures and dragons, I think.'
'But we encountered none on our passage of it.' 'Did we not? What was that ugly thing that flew across the sky?' The Black Bog, it was said, was a portal to the Dark Worlds. On our nightmare journey through it, we had walked on one or more of these worlds before miraculously finding our way back home. It worried Maram that if we could wander out of the bog onto the familiar soil of Ea, so could other things from other places.
'What of the Grays?' he said to me. 'And what if there are worse things than those Soul-Suckers? What of the Dark One himself?'
To the sound of the Guardians digging a moat in the black earth around our encampment, I thought of Angra Mainyu, once the greatest of the Galadin - and now, if Master Juwain was right, the greatest of ghuls who would bring evil to all worlds. What shape had this once-bright being taken on? Was he still fair of form and wondrous in aspect? Or had the vile work of ages twisted him like a blackened worm so that he was hideous to behold?
'Angra Mainyu,' I reassured Maram, 'is bound on Damoom.'
'So Kane says - but what if he's wrong? And what if Morjin finds a way to free him?'
'He won't,' I said, 'as long as we guard the Lightstone. Now, why don't we finish making camp and raise a glass of beer - and forget all this talk of dark creatures and such?'
That night Maram raised more than one glass of thick, dark Ishkan beer. But he did not quite forget his dread of things that might come for him out of the night. And neither did I. Although the Black Bog lay a good twenty-five miles to the north of us, a hint of its terrors wafted across the lake in the faint fetor of rotting vegetation and mires that could suck a man down into the earth. It seemed to ding to our garments and to work its way inside us, even as
we broke camp early the next morning and began climbing into the clearer and sweeter air of the mountains. A sense of overwhelming wrongness pervaded me I felt something pursuing me, not necessarily from behind us or from any direction in space, but rather in time, from the past - or perhaps the future. It had the feel of Morjin. But in it also was Angra Mainyu's hatred of life, and all life's cruelty to life; it reeked of blood and screams and the sickness of the soul in surrendering to its worst nightmares. Didn't all evil, like decaying flesh, have the same foul odor? Didn't suffering too? It came to me then that the terrible pain Estrella carried inside her might not have its source in Argattha after all. For if all things took their being from the One - fallen angels and swords no less flowers and trees and bright, singing birds - then might not the blame for Estrella's suffering be laid at the workings and will of this terrible One? For the next two days, this realization oppressed me. I did not speak of it to Maram or Master Juwain, for they had trials of their own. Our passage through the mountains was difficult. The roads over these great peaks of the Shoshan range were slanted and bad. Fierce summer rains found us working our way up or down steep tracks of stone and dirt, which turned to streams of slippery mud beneath our horses' driving hooves. On one of the numerous switchbacks snaking up the sides of the slopes, Sar Jarlath's horse lost its footing and fell against some rocks near a spruce tree, breaking its leg with a sharp crack and ripping open its belly. Sar Jarlath plunged into these rocks as well; miraculously, he suffered only a broken arm. It was not a bad break, and Master Juwain mended it quickly. But the horse had to be put to death. This mercy killing saddened all of us, for he was a great-spirited warhorse that Sar Jarlath had ridden to an honorable seventh place in the long lance competition.
On the last day in the mountains, we passed by the Ishkan fortress of Karkallu and came down into the narrow valley of the Snake River. Beneath gray, heavy skies, we followed its bends and rapids toward the west. It was drier in this broken land, and the silver maples and oaks around us soon gave way to cottonwoods and hawthorn that grew along the watercourses of the Wendrush. We had our first view of the great grasslands late in the afternoon on the fifth of Marud. I led our company up a rocky hill at the mouth of the valley, and there before us for many miles lay a sea of green. Far out to the curving horizon - west, north and south - these dark plains lit up with flashes of lightning from the even darker clouds pressing down upon them. Their oppressive flatness was broken only by a few hummocks and the blue-gray track of the Snake River winding its way toward the much greater Poru a hundred miles farther on. To the south of the Snake, the Adirii tribe of the Sarni held sway; they were allied with the Kurmak, whose lands stretched out north of the river and west of the mountains. Into this open country of antelope, sagosk and lions, I sent three knights: Sar Avram, Lord Noldru the Bold and Baltasar. They were to seek out the headmen of the Kurmak's clans, and if possible, Sajagax himself. For I did not want to lead a force of nearly two hundred knights into unknown country without the permission of those who possessed it. We made camp on a little triangle of land at the confluence of the Snake and a mountain stream that flowed into it. We fortified it heavily. It would be a bad place to be caught in the event of a thunderstorm and a flood. But there, at the gateway to the Wendrush, I feared raging Sarni warriors on horses more than I did raging waters.
And so we waited there for four days, resting, repairing ripped tents and other gear, polishing our armor and sharpening our swords. I took to spending part of each morning with Estrella. She gave signs that she wanted me to teach her to play my flute, and this I did. She learned its ways even more quickly than had riding her horse. In her long, tapering fingers, this slip of wood came alive with bright, happy sounds. She seemed to speak with music, with her beautiful hands, with the expressions of her lively face. And most of all, as her notes trilled sweetly to -harmonize with the piping of the birds and the rushing of the river, the flames of her being seemed to pour forth like liquid fire from her lovely eyes, and that was the most marvelous music of all.
And yet there were moments, as at the monstrous Aradar castle, when her songs swelled with an unutterable sadness. It seemed that some black and bottomless chasm opened inside her and cut her off from that which she most desired. Then her music became a plaint and a plea that hurt me to hear and filled my heart with an unbearable pain. Listening to her play this way one morning, I knew that I must find a way to help her. I had no power to straighten crooked limbs or mend torn flesh, as Joakim the blacksmith's son, was said to do; this I had proved in my failure to cure a cripple I had encountered along the road to Nar and again with Asaru at the tournament. But might I, somehow, be able to heal a broken soul? Baltasar would say I could; so would his father, Lansar Raasharu, and many others. The words of Kasandra's prophecy sounded inside me like trumpets then. It came to me that Estrella would show me the Maitreya: but only in the art of my easing her long, deep and terrible suffering.
On the last morning of our sojourn, I found a spot on some rocks by the stream to sit with her. The air was sweet with spray and the song of two bluebirds warbling at each other: cheer cheer-lee churr. Estrella brought forth my flute, and I brought forth the Lightstone. All along the way from Mesh she had shown little interest in the golden cup. But now she held out her hand for me to give it to her. This I did. If I expected it to flare brightly and bathe her in its magical light, I was disappointed. The cup remained quiescent and shone no more brightly than did ordinary gold. She sat for a long while gazing at it with her deep, wild eyes. Then she smiled and dipped the cup into the stream. She held it to her lips, drinking down the clear water in three quick swallows. It seemed that she was only thirsty.
'The Lightstone holds more than water,' I said to her as I took back the cup. 'Here, let me show you.'
As she breathed lightly on the end of my flute, her bright eyes were like mirrors showing me the deepest parts of myself And calling me to bring forth the music inside me. She sat watching me and waiting as she played my flute and looked into my eyes. She looked at the Lightstone, too. The sun's rays streamed down from the sky and filled it with a golden radiance. I felt some part of this heavenly fire pass through my hands into me. It warmed my blood with an unbearably sweet pressure that broke open my heart. Everything that was there came pouring out of me and into her. Her face lit up like the sun itself then. She put aside my flute and laughed in her sweet, silent way until her eyes glistened with tears. She stared at the Lightstone, now shining with a numinous intensity. Its brilliance dazzled her; she sat frozen by the stream, her eyes wide open to the clear, blue sky and the shimmering cottonwood trees. I had a strange sense that she was seeing not just their billowing canopies but millions of separate silver-green leaves. It was as if she was aware of the One pouring out its light through all things. And shining with its greatest splendor in her. For a moment, it seemed, she was swept away by both these outer and inner luminosities, and there was no difference. She seemed to remain in this river of light forever. At last, her eyes blazed into mine as she returned to the world. The smile on her face made my heart sing. I sensed that, at least for a time, the ground of her being had knitted itself together and she was made whole again.
Something changed in me, too. Some of the terrible doubt that had oppressed me for many miles suddenly left me, like a wound lanced and emptied of poison. Estrella and I returned to our encampment to take our midday meal, and it seemed I stood straighter and walked with a lighter step. Sunjay Naviru, Lord Raasharu and others looked at me strangely, as if I had donned a magical garment woven of light.
And then later that afternoon, my happiness swelled like the sea, for out of the steppe to the west, three riders crested a knoll and galloped toward us. I recognized the blue rose of Baltasar's emblem and those of Sar Avram and Lord Noldru. They brought straight to me two pieces of great, good news: the lake told of in Master Juwain's verses had been located near the Snake River only thirty miles to the west And Trahadak the Elder of the Za
kut clan had invited us, in the name of Sajagax, to cross his lands freely on our way to seek out Sajagax and Alonia.
Chapter 15
At dawn the next morning I led the Guardians out onto the Wendrush. The plains to the west blazed red with the fire of the rising sun, while the cool turf over which we rode remained steeped in the mountains' shadow. But soon the sun rose higher, and we broke free from the zone of darkness into the sun's strong, streaming rays. The air clicked with the sound of grasshoppers and buzzed with bees. Long grasses swished beneath us, scraping our horses' flanks and across our diamond-sheathed legs. We followed the general course of the winding river toward the lake that Baltasar had told of. If he was right about its location, we should reach it near the end of a long day's ride. And if he was right about Trahadak the Elder's assurance of safe passage, we should encounter no Sarni warriors that day.
The Zakut encampment lies forty miles to the north of the lake,' he had told me during our council the night before. 'Along the river, at this time of year, the Zakut - all the Kurmak - do not pitch their tents.'
'And why is that?' Maram had asked him.
'Because it seems the river is given to flooding.'
'Flooding, you say? Ah, well, water is only water. But can this Trahadak be trusted?'
'The Sarni are savages, it's true,' Baltasar had admitted. 'But we've given them a gift of gold, and they have always been known to honor their word.'
It vexed me more than a little that I had to rely on Trahadak's word in crossing this unknown country. And so I sent outriders ahead us and behind to scout for bands of warriors that Trahadak might not know of. I did not really fear attack from any small numbers; it seemed that the only force capable of threatening us was that led by Trahadak himself. Even so, I did not want to be unprepared.
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