'As long as you are in my service, you'll do as you're ordered!
'But I am not in your service, King Shamesh. Freely I've ridden here, and freely I'll ride into battle.'
'Under whose command?'
'Under my own. Where the fighting is thickest, where Morjin stands, there I shall be.'
'And if my knights keep you from this revenge?'
'Then you shall lose both my sword and your knights.' My father and Kane stared at each other with equal savagery. Finally my father said, 'And what if Morjin has a firestone? It's told that you possess one of the black gelstei. With it you could keep Morjin from burning the castle's walls.'
Kane took out his dark crystal, which looked like a teardrop of obsidian. He squeezed it in his fist and said, 'Morjin does not have a firestone. But even if he did, it would take him a day to burn through the castle's walls. First he would turn its flame upon your army, that none would be left to stop him. And so you would do better to let me take the field, with my gelstei as well as my sword.'
My father nodded his head to Kane, bowing to his logic, no less his fierce will. Then Atara unwrapped her two red arrows and said to my father, 'I, too, shall ride to the battle with Kane.'
'Very well,' my father sighed out. Then he turned to Maram. 'You, at least, are under my command. And so you'll remain here, with Val.'
It surprised no one at the table when Maram fought off a smile of relief and gladly assented to what my father had said: 'You wish me to stay by Val's side? I shall! I shall! We'll keep the castle safe!'
After that my father dismissed everyone except me. He rose from his chair and laid his hand on my shoulder, saying, 'Let's take a walk outside the walls, shall we?'
I followed him out of the keep and then through the throngs of people in the west ward as he made his way to the castle's gates. The great iron doors were still open, and we went outside and stood upon the band of ground between the castle and the drawbridge spanning the Kurash River. In the event of an assault the bridge's entire end section could be pulled up to cover the castle's gates and break the bridge in two.
'Have you seen that the chains have been oiled?' he said, pointing at the black links of iron that worked the bridge.
'You asked me to, didn't you?'
'Good,' he told me.
He took me by the arm and led me along the narrow ground above the river. We had to step carefully lest we stumble into its churning waters. We rounded the great gate tower and came out on the castles southern side. A steep, rocky slope led down toward the houses of Silvassu below. It would be impossible, I knew, for any siege tower to be rolled up it to assault the wails - and difficult unto the death for warriors to bring up ladders or grappling hooks. I set my hand upon the warm granite of the wall, looking up at the overhanging parapets high above. I could almost feel burning oil raining down upon me and sizzling into my flesh. Not even a monkey, I thought, could find a handhold in the wall's smooth stone.
'The masonry looks sound,' he said, craning his neck as he looked up.
'It is,' I said. 'Every inch of it.'
'Good. Our ancestors built it well. And we've kept it well.' He rapped his knuckles against the white granite and smiled. 'Even with all our guests, we've food enough to last two years. And the wells will never run dry. Our castle will never be taken.'
'No,' I promised him, 'it won't be.'
'So many Elahads have lived here,' he said to me. 'Going back to the first Shavashar, and Elkasar, for whom your grandfather was named.'
My father must have forgotten that he had told me this before, more than once. His thoughts seemed to be far away, dwelling with the dead.
'A great battle we'll fight soon,' he said to me. 'The greatest ever fought in Mesh.'
As he gazed off at Silvassu and the Valley of the Swans below, glowing a deep green in the late sun, he shifted his weight suddenly and had to fight to keep from plunging down the slope. I clasped onto his arm to steady him.
'Are you all right, sir?'
'I nearly fell,' he said, gripping my hand. And then his eyes darkened as with storm clouds as he told me, 'If I should fall in battle, Asaru will make a fine king. You must help him, Val. You, of all your brothers, he trusts the most.'
'You won't fall, sir. This battle can be won - you said so yourself.'
But he seemed not to be listening to me. His eyes grew bright and clear as he gazed out upon Mount Eluru shining white with snow across the valley.
'All of my sons,' he said, 'would make good kings. Even Yarashan.'
'You think so?' I said to him.
'Yes, even he. He is full of vainglory. But in the end, he would overcome it and find his greatness in his love of his people instead of himself. After you won the championship, do you know what he said to me?'
'No, what?'
He said: "Better Val than me."'
'Yarashan said that?'
'Truly, he did. He loves you, you know.'
'Yes,' I told him,' Iknow.'
'And Karshur. My second son is so strong, if not possessing the quickest of minds. But he is wise enough to call upon the counsel of others - if he were king, he would need to call upon you.' 'Do not speak so,' I said, gripping his hand. But he didn't listen to me. He smiled to himself as he affirmed the various virtues of my brothers. Jonathay, he said, seemed too full of whimsy to be a king, and yet he had a way of bringing his dreams down to earth and inspiriting people. Mandru was as fierce as a wolverine, and difficult - and in this very irritation at others, he often found the will to be gentle toward them and protect them. As he had protected me from Yarashan's bullying when I was a boy.
'All of my sons,' he said again, 'it's our weaknesses that make us strong - the way we overcome them. The way we overcome ourselves.' He turned toward me then, and eyes were like two stars shining with a deep light.
'But you have no weaknesses!' I said to him. 'You think not?' he said, smiling at me.
'Not as a king. No king has ever given more of himself to his people. You cannot know how they love you. All your warriors - they would die for you.'
'And I would die for them,' he said. 'And I love them as I love the mountains and rivers of my home. And yet...'
'Yes?'
He gripped my hand so hard that it hurt, and I could hardly bear the way that he looked at me.
'And yet, ' he told me, resting his other hand against the castle's great walls, 'if my whole army were lost, it would not be as dear to me as what I know will remain safe inside here.'
'But my brothers,' I said, swallowing back the pain in my throat, 'if they were lost too, then ...'
My rather gazed at me for what seemed a thousand years as my heart pounded inside me. And he said to me, 'As long as one of us lives, Valashu, we all live.'
We went back inside the castle after that. An hour later, my father called for his warhorse, Karkhad, to be brought into the west ward. The crowds of women and children there moved aside to make way for this great, snorting beast. Karkhad's face, neck and chest, as well as his hindquarters, had been fitted with curving sweeps of steel plate. And so it was with the mounts of my brothers, for they gathered there, too. They wore their diamond battle armor and black surcoats emblazoned with the silver swan and the stars of the Elahads. Their shields showed identical charges, except that each one bore a distinguishing mark of cadence on its point. Ravar's was a sunburst, and he was the first of my brothers to embrace me and bid me farewell. Then Jonathay laughed as he embraced me to assure me that we would meet again, and soon. Next 1 said goodbye to Mandru, and then Karshur, who nearly squeezed me in half with his thick, hard arms. Yarashan, resplendent in all his polished diamonds and steel, stepped up to me and said, 'It would have been a great contest, wouldn't it, to see who could slay more of the enemy? Well, perhaps in another battle.' Asaru took his leave of me in silence. The hope in his eyes, no less his concern for me, was so strong and bright it made me weep.
For a while, the six of them stood there on the hard
packed dirt saying farewell to my mother and grandmother. Lansar Raasharu and a company of knights assembled behind them, back near the Adami Tower. So did Kane and Atara. Then my father pulled on his helm, crested by a white swan plume, and it was time to go. They all mounted their horses. And my father led them pounding through the gateway and they rode out to war.
Chapter 32
Morjin's army invaded Mesh on the sixth of Ioj. The Galdans, under the Saroch, Radomil Makan, as the high priests of the Kallimun were called, moved a day later, on the seventh. Messengers brought us word of this desecration of our sacred soil. My father saw no point in wasting warriors at the passes, and so he had ordered the garrisons there to remain within the kel keeps, behind their walls. This presented Morjin with a difficult choice: he could lose part of his army besieging the keep, which might take a month, or simply march around it. But if he did that, then his line of supplies would likely be cut, and his army would be forced to live off whatever they could take from Mesh's countryside. And more, in the event of his defeat, his retreat from Mesh might be hindered. So it was with Radomil and the Galdans. It encouraged no one when Morjin decided to march straight down the road to Lashku and across the Lake County. He paused only to ravage the abandoned farms there, and he bypassed Lashku altogether, leaving that walled city inviolate behind him. He clearly desired a showdown with our army as quickly as possible. It seemed that he did not fear defeat.
The Galdans, however, gave sign that they were at least as interested in plundering Mesh's mineral wealth as they were in giving battle. Reports came that the Galdans laid siege to Godhra for half a day before they broke off and resumed their march north. Morjin must have commanded them to leave its despoliation until their return, after our army was destroyed. As it was, the Galdans raided several armories outside Godhra's walls, and made off with many bushels of diamonds. And worse, they slew half a dozen swordmakers and their families, and others.
Most of my people, however, at least for the time, found safety behind thick stone walls or in the fastnesses deep within mountains. They made sure that there was little to feed these two great armies, taking with them as many cattle, sheep and sacks of grain as they could. In revenge, Morjin ordered the burning of their fields. A line of flaming wheat and barley followed the line of his march like the track of a fire-breathing dragon.
On Ioj the twelfth, the Sakayans and Galdans met up outside Hardu and my father finally marched south. There followed a series of threats and maneuvers as my father strove to destroy or at least decimate Morjin's combined forces as they crossed the Arashar River. A small battle was fought at Kinshan Bridge, and the Meshians had much the better of the day, killing some three hundred Caldans and even more of Morjin's mercenaries. But Morjin was a skilled and hardened warlord, and he seemed not to mind spending the lives of his men to achieve his objectives. He used this sacrifice at the bridge to move the main body of his army across the river lower down, toward Lake Waskaw where it was shallow enough in this dry season for his baggage train to cross without being swept away.
My father was forced then to order a retreat back north, for he would not give battle in the mostly flat and open country between Lake Waskaw and Silvassu. There it would be too easy for the Sarni to harry his warriors or even ride around, them and attack his army from the rear. And in a pitched battle, it would be too easy for Morjin's men, with their much greater numbers, to swarm like ants around our army's flanks and push their spears into our backs.
It wasn't hard for my father to outmaneuver this unruly and motley mass of men. Three armies Morjin had to co-ordinate, counting the Sarni, and his problem in this regard was even worse than it seemed, for the Sakayan force was itself composed of disparate elements: nine thousand heavy infantry out of Argattha; three thousand Blues from the mountains of western Sakai; seventeen thousand mercenaries from Hesperu, Karabuk and other realms of Ea; a thousand Ikurian horse and five thousand of Morjin's famed Dragon Guard, decked out in steel armor that had been tinctured bright red. The Galdans, though all of the same realm, did not all appear to be of the same quality. Twenty thousand heavy infantry formed their core, supported by as many light infantry and eight hundred light cavalry. These, it was thought, could not hold up to the deadly strokes of Valari kalamas. The two hundred Galdan heavy horse were too few to withstand the charge of our knights, and the Galdans were weak in archers, as well. No doubt Morjin counted on the Sarin's arrows to rain down death upon us from afar.
I spent those days of waiting in prowling about the castle and discussing the enemy's strengths and weaknesses with Sunjay Naviru and the Guardians, as well as with Sar Vikan, Sar Araj, Sar Jovan and the other captains in charge of the castle's defenses. Five companies of knights and warriors my father had left behind to man the battlements. Some thought that these were too many, that my father could have made better use of them on the field facing the Sakayans spear to spear and shield to shield. Others argued that they were too few. Whenever I walked through the wards and beheld the mothers reassuring their children that everything would be all right, it seemed that ten thousand warriors lined up along the walls could not be enough to protect Mesh's greatest treasure.
On the evening of the fourteenth, I took my dinner in the great hall with my mother and grandmother, and with Lord Rathald and his family, who shared our table. Lord Tomavar's young wife, Vareva, joined us, too. We had fresh lamb that night, all bloody and red the way we Meshians liked it. There were peas and mashed potatoes, as well, and blueberries with cream. It seemed that it might be the last such feast we would have, for everyone was saying that the battle would begin the next day. But Vareva hardly touched her meal. She was only twenty-three and beautiful, even for a Valari, with shiny, sable hair, ivory skin and eyes so large and full of light that people would find excuses to engage her in conversation just so that they might look upon her. It was something of a scandal that Lord Tomavar had married such a young woman after Vareva's husband had fallen at the battle of the Red Mountain. But it seemed that both of them had married for love. Lord Tomavar, more than once, had endured the laughter of his former rivals when they had caught him picking wildflowers for Vareva to put in her hair. And Vareva, more than once, had been heard to say: 'What do I care if my husband is older than I when he has the hands of a sculptor and the soul of an angel?' It was Vareva who helped me understand how hard it was on the women left behind when their men went off to battle.
When I told her that she should try to eat and gather her strength, she pressed her palm into her belly and said to me, 'Lord Valashu, you were gone on your first journey for how long? Half a year?'
'Yes,' I told her, 'that's right.'
'And on how many of those days were you close to death? Thirty? Sixty?'
'Perhaps,' I said.
Vareva looked down the table at my mother, who had piped between bites of blueberries. And she told me, 'Your mother died, a little, every day that you were gone. And a thousand times every night.'
That night I could not sleep for worrying what the next day might bring to my brothers and countrymen. A messenger from my father had informed me earlier that our army had set up on good ground below the Kurash River, near the village of Balvalam only five miles from the castle. There, on the morrow, on the Culhadosh Commons where only a week before many sheep had grazed on its acres of grass, the warriors of Mesh would stand and bleed the ground red with the blood of our enemies - either that or die themselves.
The ides of Ioj dawned clear and bright with the last of summer's warmth. I was up early, and I put on my battle armor in the quiet of Yarashan's room. As the roosters in their coops gave call, I mounted the stairs to the Swan Tower and stood in the crenel between two thick merlons gazing out at the countryside beyond Silvassu. The warriors stationed there did not speak to me. I shielded my eyes against the sun's fiery glister as it rose over the mountains to the east. The fields and forests below the Kurash were shrouded in haze and seemed as peaceful as a meadowlark singing its morni
ng song. But I knew that only five miles away, obscured by green hills and a swathe of woods, my father's army would be marching out of its camp and lining up to face the hordes of men that Morjin had summoned out of Galda and Argattha.
I listened for the booming of the great kettle drums, but Culhadosh Commons was too far away, and the pounding of blood in my ears was too loud. The streets and yards of Silvassu below were quiet, and so were the houses, for my people had deserted the city to take refuge in the castle or in the mountains to the west. I listened for the sound of silver bells fastened to the ankles of my father's warriors and jangling out into the stillness of the morning. But all I could hear was the squealing of a pig being slaughtered, the sawing of wood, and hammers beating against ringing iron in the shops off the middle ward as the casde awakened and people went about their business. The glowing charcoal of their cooking fires sent plumes of dark smoke into the air. Along the battlements, my warriors stood ready to light fires of their own, beneath cauldrons of oil or sand, should the enemy appear and attack the castle. I leaned out over the crenel and breathed in deeply; my nostrils and throat burned as I recalled the smell of a battlefield's blood that could drive both men and beasts mad. I kept gazing off toward the Culhadosh Commons. The land grew greener and brighter as the sun rose higher in the sky. The air began to heat up; so did the steel plates reinforcing the shoulders of my armor. Sweat slicked my skin down my sides and stung my eyes.
And then, out of the east, a rider appeared. I squinted, trying to make out the details of his tiny form as he made his way up the River Road toward the castle. He drew closer. Just as he entered Silvassu and the houses blocked my line of sight, I caught a glimpse of his colors-a great blue rose shining out from a gold field. Now that Baltasar was dead, this could only be the charge of Lord Lansar Raasharu.
I nearly flew down the Swan Tower's long spiral of stairs in my haste to know why he had returned to the castle. I ran across the middle ward, dodging around pots of bubbling porridge and boys playing with wooden swords. Maram happened to be taking breakfast there with a woman named Ursa. He followed me as 1 crossed the west ward and then shouted out for the guards in the gate tower to open the sally port set into the locked gates. This they did. I greeted Lansar as his horse galloped across the bridge over the Kurash River.
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