Lord of Lies

by David Zindell

  All that morning, however, we saw no beings that went on two legs, except ourselves and some flocks of ostrakats who waved their lone necks at us and hissed fiercely to warn us away. The Sarni, of course even though they are human beings like any others, do not go forth on two legs, for they are masters of the horse and worship this noble animal as others do the sun and sky. A Sarni warrior, it is said, measures his wealth by four things: the gold beaten into the ornaments that encircle his limbs; the shaggy sagosk that he herds; the women he has taken as wives; and the number and quality of horses that he rides. A man. His also said, might have to wait many years to marry; he might be stripped of gold and lose all of his sagosk in raids. But a man must possess at least one horse, or he is not counted a man.

  As we rode along in our three columns, we kept the curves of the river to our left, sometimes at a distance of a mile, sometimes only a hundred yards away, for we wanted to follow as straight a course as possible. Around noon, though, we had to circle to the north to avoid a herd of wild sagosk grazing along the river. But in so doing, we managed to flush a pride of lions that stalked the sagosk and preyed upon their stragglers and young. Seven great, yellow-eyed beasts burst from the grass in a shock of bunching muscles and unleashed power. The huge cats frightened our horses, who screamed and reared up, kicking out their legs and bucking Sar Viku and four other knights from their backs. The lions, perhaps frightened by the glister of our diamond armor and nearly two hundred long lances pointed at them, ran off into the grass. It was a wonder, I thought, that Sar Viku and the others took only bruises from their violent falls.

  Toward the end of the day, with the sun bloodying the clouds on the western horizon, we crested a hummock and finally sighted the lake about five miles ahead of us in a depression in the earth many miles wide. The Snake River flowed into it. Somewhere to the west of this hazy blue body of water, it must also flow out. I wanted to ride closer to get a better look at this mysterious lake; I had considered making camp on its shores that night. But it had grown too late. It would be better, I thought, to dig our moat and build our stockade from the fallen wood down by the river to the left of us. There, with the river bending sharply south through the grassy steppe before bending back north and west, we would be protected by water on three sides.

  And so we rode down into this sheltered pocket of land and set to work. Guardians sheathed their lances and drew forth spades from the packhorses to dig in the tough, sun-seared turf. I posted Sar Kimball and three other Guardians as sentries on a rise a few hundred yards farther out on the steppe, away from the river. It was one of these, Sar Varald, who broke the peace of that quiet place. The sudden blare of his trumpet seemed to shatter the very air, I looked to the north to see these four Guardians galloping toward us.

  'Mount,' I cried out. I ran over to where Altaru was tethered to some branches that we had intented to fashion into a fence. All around me between tents lying limp on to ground, in the chaos of our camp, Guardians were running for their horses too. 'Mount and form up!'

  As Sar Varald and the others came pounding up to us. I commanded the Guardians to array themselves in three lines facing north toward the rise overlooking the river. Twenty of these, by arrangement remained unhorsed. They were our best archers and I posted them, ten to either side of us, on our flanks. While the rest of us sat upon our snorting horses with our lances pointing north, the archers strung their great longbows and began building a fence of arrows in front of them by sticking many long, feathered shafts point-down into the ground.

  'Treachery!' Sar Kimball cried out as he and the other sentries reined up his huge sorrel at the front of our lines. There, at our center with the late sun making brilliant the diamond armor of two hundred Valari knights. I waited with Maram and Lansar Raasharu to my right while Baltasar and Sunjay Naviru sat on top of their mounts to my left. 'Treachery, Lord Valashu! The Sarni are upon us!'

  'How many?' I asked him. I gazed at the grassy rise a few hundred yards away waiting.

  'Two hundred,' he said. 'Perhaps more - it was hard to tell.' I turned to look past the two lines of knights backing us up. There, behind our center, Lord Harsha sat on his horse, and Behira and Estrella sat on theirs. Skyshan of Ki, who bore the Lightstone, was with them, along with Sar Adamar, Sar Jarlath and Sar Hannu of Anjo. If the worst befell, these knights would die to a man protecting Skyshan, even as we protected them. And Lord Harsha would certainly fight to the death in defense of his daughter and Estrella.

  'Two hundred,' Lord Raasharu repeated in his calm, clear voice. No man in our lines had more experience of battle than he. 'Even odds.' He said this, I thought, to inspirit us. For the odds were not equal. I remembered what my father had taught me as a boy: that while we Valari were nearly always invincible on the ground of the Morning Mountains, here on the endless grasslands of the Wendrush against the Sarni, our heavilv armored knights were at a great disadvantage. 'There they are!' Maram suddenly cried out as he pointed ahead of us

  Along the line of the rise, some two hundred and twenty men on horses suddenly appeared against the cloud-dappled sky. They wore conical helmets polished brightly and black leather breast-pieces, hardened and studded with steel. Gorgets of gold gleamed around their necks, and many of these barbaric warriors sported golden circlets on their bare arms. Their faces were painted blue. Long, drooping, yellow moustaches spilled down beneath their chins. Each of them held in his hand a double-curved bow made of sinew, wood and horn. These powerful bows - and the arrows they fired - could work quick slaughter of their enemies from distances that matched the range of our longbows. If not for a miracle, I thought, they might slaughter us: we Valari, who were the most ancient and hated of their enemies.

  'Baltasar!' I cried out as I stared at these wild men. 'Which one is Trahadak - can you point him out?'

  I vowed to myself that if the Sarni charged us, the treacherous Trahadak the Elder should be the first to die.

  Baltasar held his hand to the ridge of his helmet as he scanned the warriors before us. He shook his head, saying, 'The distance is too great.'

  'Damn them!' Maram said. I saw that he had taken out his fire-stone. The cracked crystal remained useless in his hand. 'Damn this gelstei! If this were made whole again, I'd give them a little fire for turning against us. Do you think they've come for more gold?'

  I couldn't say. It seemed certain that they couldn't have come for the gold of the Lightstone, for Baltasar had kept it and our mission a secret. But surely the Sarni wanted something of us, if only our horses, our arms and perhaps our lives.

  'Do you think they want to parlay?' Maram asked. 'Surely they'd want to parlay before giving battle. Wouldn't they?'

  I scanned the rise ahead of us. I saw no white flag raised, only standards embroidered with various animals that might be emblems of various clans. To the west, the clouds along the horizon broke apart, and the sun's rays streamed low and glinted from the Sarni's two hundred and twenty helmets. I did not know what they were waiting for.

  'Perhaps they're only the vanguard,' Maram said. 'Perhaps more of them are coming. Should we retreat?'

  We could not retreat. With the cold, rushing river to our back and to either side of us, we had no escape in those directions. Escape, in any case, out on the steppe, was impossible. The lithe and swift Sarni ponies could overtake our heavy warhorses even as the Sarni warriors, at full gallop, fired arrows at us and picked us off one by one.

  'If only we'd had time to finish making camp,' Maram muttered.

  'Then we'd be safe enough, wouldn't we? Ah, well, if they wait much longer, it will fall dark, and perhaps we can raise up a stockade against their arrows.'

  But this hope, too, was futile. Surely our enemy, if they were indeed our enemy, would not allow us simply to go about our business of fortifying our camp. And even if they did, what would we do then? Cower behind our flimsy breastworks while the Sarni besieged us and waited for our food to run out? It seemed that I had led my men into a trap, though I cou
ldn't see how I could have done otherwise; for us Valari, the entire steppe of the Wendrush was one enormous trap, from the Morning Mountains to the white peaks of the Nagarshath four hundred miles away. At no time in my life, except in Argattha, had I felt so helpless.

  'What should we do, Val?' Maram asked me. Two hundred silent knights along the lines to my right and left looked my way, and their black, blazing eyes seemed to ask me the same question. They were the finest of Valari warriors, and yet they were still men whose insides churned with dread as if they had swallowed whole bellyfuls of writhing worms.

  There is always a way, I told myself, remembering how we had fought our way out of Argattha. Always a way toward victory.

  I nudged Altaru out a few paces before turning right to ride down our line and then back to the left. I spoke no brave words to my men. But I looked at each of them eye to eye. I opened my heart to them. And so I passed to them the flaming torch that blazed inside me. An understanding passed back and forth between us, growing brighter and brighter, driving away fear and doubt.

  'Champion!' they seemed to shout at me. 'Champion! Champion!' A radiance lit up the center of my being with all brilliance and sound of a thunderbolt.

  'Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!' And then, as I remembered my purpose and who I really was, another thought came over me: And there must be a way to end war.

  1 returned to my place at the center of our line. To Maram, I said, 'What we will do is to fight like angels, if fight we must. But first we will seek peace.'

  I called for a white flag of truce then. Sar Artanu brought the banner forward, and I took it from his hand.

  'No, Val!' Baltasar called out as I made ready to ride forward. 'You forget yourself - your place is here, in command. Let me go instead.'

  I considered giving the banner to him. But just then, from the rise before us, a harsh tattoo blared out from one of the Sarni's battle horns. The entire host of blue-faced warriors let loose a long and terrible battle cry. And then perhaps a hundred of them spurred their horses forward and charged down upon us.

  'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out to me. 'It seems we'll have to fight after all.'

  In my haste to draw my sword, I dropped the white flag to the ground beneath us. Alkaladur's blade flared bright silver in the setting sun's light. I dreaded the thought of reddening it in the bodies of these screaming savages. My stomach tightened into a hard knot of pain; although it was not a warm day, sweat slicked my body beneath my diamond armor. My sword arm burned with a sick heat even as the shake and shudder of Altaru's trembling body beneath me filled mine with a rage to ride down our enemies and trample them into the grass.

  Our archers began loosing their arrows before the Sarni did, for their longbows, cut of mountain yew, slightly outranged the Sarni's bows. The whine of feathered shafts split the air like huge insects flying furiously to drink blood. Three of the arrows found targets, but their companions all had bows of their own, and they were more than a hundred to our twenty archers. As they thundered closer, they began firing off arrows of their own. Hundreds of them hissed forth in a hazy cloud. The Sarni were the finest archers on earth. Even the difficulty of aiming at distant targets from on top of bounding ponies, it seemed, would not keep them very long from decimating us.

  As I struggled to slow the wild beating of my heart, a great many arrows struck straight into us. Only our armor saved us. Arrow points broke against the rows of diamonds encasing our chests and limbs or glanced off altogether. The clacking of steel against these sparkling crystals was horrible to hear. And even more horrible to bear. An arrow bounced off my shoulder, bruising it. Another slammed into my belly, and nearly knocked the wind from me. A third pinged against my helmet. It was like being caught in the open in a hailstorm of death.

  'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out next to me. 'Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!'

  The Sarni drew.closer, and I held my shield over my face. Five arrows struck against it; four of them pierced the silver swan and stars etched into its black steel and stuck there, rendering it useless. I cast it down on top of the white flag beneath me. Then Lansar Raasharu nudged his horse over to me and extended me his shield. 'Damn them! They've singled you out, Lord Valashu. Please take this and keep your face covered!'

  'No, this is too much,' I said to him. 'You'll have nothing to cover yourself.'

  'They're not concentrating on me. Now, please, take it and remember to angle it so that the arrows glance off.'

  I nodded my head as more arrows whined past me. I strapped on his shield and said, 'Thank you.'

  Down the line from me, Aivar of Taron cried out as an arrow pierced his eye. Other arrows found chinks in the diamond armor of other knights, killing or wounding them. An arrow tore into the flank of Sar Eladaru's horse, which screamed out its agony. In despair, one of the younger knights, Sar Shivalad cried out, 'Why don't they just kill all our horses and be done with us?'

  But the Sarni do not kill horses; they would rather kill their mothers or wives. Any warrior who knowingly took aim at a horse in battle would be seized by his fellow warriors and staked out on the grass for the lions to eat. Even so, in any battle, even the finest of Sarni archers sometimes missed their marks.

  'This is too much!' Maram muttered against the whine and clacking of the arrows and the Sarni warriors' terrible screams. 'What should we do, Val?' 'Wait,' I told him. 'But it's hopeless! If they don't kill us all on this charge, they will the next - or the one after that.'

  'No!' I told him, remembering what Kane had said to me in Argattha. 'There might yet be a chance!'

  With every yard that the hundred Sarni gained toward us, their arrows found their targets with ever greater accuracy and frequency. Three of my knights cried out as they fell from their horses, and then four more. I sensed that this emboldened the Sarni, even as our archers struck down three of them. Closer and closer they galloped, yelling at us and firing arrows with an almost drunken frenzy.

  'Too close,' I whispered to myself as I peered over the rim of the shield that Lord Raasharu had given me. I studied the grassy undulations of the rapidly shrinking ground between our lines and the rampaging Sarni. And then called out, 'First line! Lances ready! Charge!'

  Not a single knight in the first line of the Guardians hesitated in spurring his horse forward. In truth, after the horrible helplessness of enduring the arrow storm, my knights exploded into action with a violent joy. Horses whinnied out their fury as my sixty knights drove them to a full gallop. The Sarni, it seemed, had been expecting just such a maneuver. For their tactics in battle were almost as old as the steppe itself: torment or tantalize the enemy into breaking ranks and charging - and then quickly retreat in order that they and their brethren might shoot their arrows from a safe distance. But the commander of these Sarni, I thought, had miscalculated the distances here. Either that or he had no experience in battle against Valari knights.

  Seeing us now thundering down upon them with our steel-pointed lances, the Sarni reined in their horses and wheeled about with amazing skill. Like a flock of birds suddenly changing direction, they began racing back toward their companions still waiting on the rise toward the north. They knew, even as I did, that their smaller ponies could always outdistance our heavy warhorses. That is, they could could either gain upon us or escape us over long distances.

  Altaru, my fierce, black stallion, like the other horses along our charging line, was a sprinter. His great muscles gathered and exploded to the rhythm and beat of his driving legs. He snorted and sweated as we fairly flew through the air with my sixty companions a scant few yards behind us. Wind whipped into my face. I felt the fear of the Sarni warriors ahead of us, and smelled the blood of their wounded. We had the advantage of momentum and rushing upon them at a full gallop even as they were still building speed from their abrupt halt. We gained on them quickly. Many of them turned in their saddles to fire off quick shots at us; one of these sizzling arrows crashed into my hip with a sharp, piercing pain that enraged me. It en
raged Altaru, too. He bore down upon the Sarni like a black fury ready to smash our enemy into the bloody grass with his great, pounding hooves.

  BA-ROO! BA-ROO! BA-ROO!

  One of the Sarni's warhorns blared out three times, and again, they halted and wheeled about. They had no intention of letting us ride them down and putting our lances through their backs.

  'Death to the Valari!' their leader cried out. He was a large man with long blond hair flowing out beneath his shining helm and blue diamonds painted on his cheeks and forehead. 'Death to the Elahad!'

  The Sarni faced us at close range over the trampled grass. Some shot arrows straight at us, and they killed three more knights. Many, though, had run out of arrows. These drew their curving sabers and clutched their little leather shields. Then, to their leader's command, they screamed as they spurred their horses toward us.

  'Death to the Valari! Kill them all!'

  They were a hundred to our sixty - now fifty-seven - but we were Valari knights, and so now the odds favored us. All along our charging line, one by one, my knights came up against the Sarni warriors. A dozen lances tore through leather armor and through the bodies or our enemies. Blood and froth sprayed the air as the screams of the dying shook the earth. A Sarni warrior shot an arrow straight into the mouth of Sar Jonawan; three others fired arrows at me that broke upon my armor. Two more warriors - one a huge man whose blue paint couldn't hide the scars on his face - charged at me screaming out their battle cry. The scarred man reached me a moment before the other and him I cleaved through the neck, splitting the gold gorget there and sweeping of his head in a single stroke. And on the backstroke, I turned in my saddle and lunged out toward the other side of me in a furious thrust that split open his friend's chest and pushed Alkaladur's point clean through his back. As I wrenched free my sword, it was as if my own heart had been wrenched from me, I screamed in agony. My enemies, in their last pulse of malice, seemed to grab my ribs from the inside and pull me down with them into death. Only Alkaladur saved me. My shining sword connected me so the sky and drew upon the deep currents of the earth. It drove back the icy nothingness, for a time, and filled me with new life.