'No, I'm sorry,' I said, 'but I can't let you come with me.'
I turned to look at Liljana, Maram, Atara, Master Juwain and Kane. 'I'm sorry, but there are already too many deaths upon me, and so I must go alone.'
I stood up and bade everyone goodnight. Then I walked out into cold rain to return to my bed of straw in the barn.
A few days later, when the weather had cleared, I finished the last of my preparations. One task remained to be completed. And so I filled a rucksack with some rations and personal things. In the crisp-ness of an autumn morning at dawn, I set out to climb Mount Telshar. Kane caught me coming out of the barn, and I saw that he had a rucksack of his own - and a large coil of rope. And he said to me, 'If I can't come with you to Argattha, at least I can see that you get up and down this mountain without breaking your neck.'
For a long time I looked through the half-light at this deep and powerful man before nodding my head and saying, 'All right.'
We spent most of the morning crossing the valley's forests and farms. The chittering of many birds greeted the rising sun. The leaves of the trees showed bright colors: oranges and yellows and vivid reds. In the fields, cattle lowed and golden barley waited to be cut.
We paused by a stream to eat a lunch of cheese, scallions and fresh bread that Behira had baked for me. Then we made our way up through the forest that blanketed Telshar's lower slopes. We followed the tinkling stream higher and higher, through crunching leaves and clear air that smelled sweet and clean. The walking was mostly easy, though the path steepened toward the end of the day. When dusk touched the trees with the first shades of darkness, we were glad to come across the first of the stone huts built into Telshar's flank. We mounded leaves inside, and spread our cloaks on top of them. For dinner that night, we had ham sandwiches and apples. We slept to the sound of the wind shushing through the trees and the wolves howling somewhere below us.
Early the next morning we set out through a frost that sparkled the forest's fallen leaves. Just before breaking out of the treeline, we gathered some wood, and slung these cumbersome bundles on our backs. I put a few stones in my rucksack as well. Half a mile farther on we came out upon naked rock, cold wind and brilliant sunshine. We climbed all that day, past the second hut, into air that grew thinner and thinner, and here we worked very hard, sweating in the sun and gasping for breath. Our route up the mountain's rocky slope was long but not particularly dangerous, and so we did not make much use of Kane's rope. When we found the third and last hut, rising up from the snowfields of Telshar's upper reaches, we unburdened ourselves of the wood and lightened our rucksacks of almost everything except a few apples and shelled nuts, and the six flat stones I carried. The weather held true, with clear skies and little bitterness to the air, and that was good, for already our feet were cold inside our stiff leather boots from crunching through old crusts of snow. And so we decided to finish our ascent in what remained of the afternoon.
I reached the summit first, with Kane only a few steps behind me. I unroped and stood staring at the beautiful thing that my people had built there. On Telshar's very highest point, many stones had been piled into a cairn, nearly half again my height and shaped like a pyramid. And on each stone rested a silver ring. Into many of them was set a single diamond; other bands showed two or three of these sparkling gems, and a few gleamed with the four diamonds of a lord. The rays of the setting sun fell upon this cairn so that the whole of it shimmered like a small mountain of brilliant lights.
I edged up dose to it, blinking my eyes against the diamonds' fire. I opened my rucksack and took out the six stones. Careful not to dislodge any of those already piled there, I reached high above my head and set them in place at the top of the cairn. Then I brought out my brothers' rings. Ravar's and Mandru's I set on two of the stones, and so with those of Jonathay, Yarashan and Karshur. I rested Asaru's ring, with its four shining diamonds, on the highest stone at the top of the cairn. From mountains these slips of silver and gems had been mined, and to the sacred mountain we called Telshar they had returned.
'You Valari,' Kane said, gazing at the cairn, 'are a strange people And a beautiful one.'
We laid our rucksacks on the snow, and sat down on them to eat some apples and nuts and take a little rest. After a while, I brought out the silken bag of astor seeds that Ninana had given me. Would the time ever come, I wondered, to plant them? I shook my head, and gave the seeds into Kane's hand for safekeeping.
He clenched the bag in his fist. Then he sniffed at the air and said, 'We'd better not linger. If a storm comes up, it would go badly for us.'
Soon enough, I thought, winter's storms would sweep down from the north and heap snow upon Telshar's summit, and bury the diamond-encrusted cairn, until spring uncovered it again. But now, here, at the top of the world, the sky was perfectly clear in every direction. Although it wasn't yet dark enough for the stars to come out, already in the east, above the mountains along the Culhadosh River, a great and glowing moon rose into the immense blue dome of the sky. To the south, far beyond Silvassu and the shining white granite of the castle, the verdant Lake Country opened up toward the Shoshan range, which curved fifty miles west and north around Lake Marash, forming a purple and white wall against the sweeps of the grassland beyond lost into the haze of the darkening distances. It seemed that from this great height, I could look down upon all of Mesh. The beauty of my land made we want to weep. Great swathes of color burst across the hills and valleys below: bands of yellow where the aspen trees edged up the mountains, and blazes of red, orange and green lower down. Scarely a stone's throw from Telshar, the deep cut in the earth of the Gorgeland showed the Arashar River's silvery sheen. I couldn't help wondering if I was seeing it for the last time.
'It's all so lovely,' Kane said, looking out toward the west. 'All of Ea, so lovely.'
I munched on an apple as I followed the line of his gaze. Beyond the mountains of my home, the Wendrush reached out into that part of the world where it seemed it was always night. For beyond the grasslands, nearly six hundred miles away, rose the Black Mountain called Skartaru.
'Some places on Ea,' I said to him, 'are less lovely than others.'
He smiled, showing his long, white teeth. Then he said, 'Surely you know that you haven't even a slim chance of slaying Morjin?'
'I know,' I told him. 'But before I die, I want him to feel what is inside me.'
'Then you hate him that much, eh?'
'Yes - don't you?'
'Hate him?' he cried out. He made a fist around a handful of snow, and his eyes burned like coals. 'So, I hate him as fire does wood, as steel does flesh. If I could, I'd cut off his head and crush it between stones like grain beneath a gristmill - then put a torch to the wound so that he couldn't grow another. I'd cut his bodv into pieces and feed them to the rats that infest his foul hole in the earth. I'd burn every book that mentions his name. No man deserves death more than he. And yet. And yet. He is a man, even as you are. He has hopes and dreams and a sense of how he might have been good and might still be. You cannot defeat him. If you can't under-stand this.'
I sat upon my lumpy rucksack as I dug my heels into the snow of Telshar's summit and listened to the wind. It was an incredible thing for him to tell me.
'Defeat him?' I said as I looked at him. 'I just want to fight him.'
'So, Val - so do I. To fight him and win.'
'But there is no winning,' I said. 'Once I thought there was, but I was wrong.'
'Were you? You nearly killed Morjin in his hall, and the day may come when you have that chance again.'
'No, he is too powerful now. And soon Angra Mainyu will stand beside him. No, there is no winning, not that way.'
'Then why fight at all?' he asked me
'Because in just fighting,' I said, 'we win something. There's never a final victory, only the struggle to attain it. And that is the only virtue. It's the only way in which good can triumph.'
Kane lifted back his head and looked up at the
night's first start. A sudden coldness fell over him, and 1 felt his whole being trembling with longing for distant lights that would always remain just out of his reach.
'I believe,' he said to me in a strange, deep voice, 'in a victory so final and complete that even the stones buried miles down to the muck of the earth will sing with joy and light.'
I shook my head at this, not quite wanting to credit what I had just heard. And I blurted out: 'But evil can't be defeated!'
And he smiled and told me, 'Neither can good.'
Far below us, as night stole the light from the world and darkness crept across Mesh, the houses of Silvassu were beginning to glow a soft orange from candles and fires lit within. All across my beautiful land, mothers would be serving meals and weeping at the absence of their sons, and fathers would be raging at the fate of daughters carried away to Argattha.
'Morjin,' I said to Kane, 'is so evil.'
Again he surprised me, saying in a soft voice, 'But there are no evil men, Val. Only evil deeds.'
'Truly,' I said, 'but some men choose, again and again, to do the worst of deeds.'
'So - just so. And that is why we must strive, again and again, every moment, to do good.'
I looked past the castle and then toward the south at the darkening green of the Culhadosh Commons. I said, 'I've failed, too often.'
'So have I,' he told me.
'In Tria, I wanted so terribly to defeat him. And so I lied.'
'Morjin's whole life is a lie.'
'Yes,' I said. 'But we can't fight lies with lies, or hate with hate. Not unless we are to become like Morjin. And that is why he'll win.'
'No, he won't. He mustn't. Don't give up.'
'Sometimes,' I said, 'I don't care. I think of my grandmother and my mother, Estrella, too. And Atara - Atara. Suffering is. It's way the world will always be. And in the end, we all lose ... everything. And so why should I care if I lie to gain advantage over our enemies or stab them in the back with a poisoned knife? Or torture them as they have me? Why should I care about anything at all?'
'Because if you don't,' he said, looking at me, 'you'll lose your soul.'
'Sometimes, I'm not sure I care about that, either.'
'So,' he told me. 'So it was with Morjin - and Angra Mainyu, too.'
I thought of Morjin as he once had been and perhaps still imagined himself to be: a man with golden eyes and a smile like the sun, beautiful in form and face. And now he was little more than sack of sickly flesh surrounding a core of corruption, foul dreams and a will to destroy his enemies that took its power from his terrible hate. The waste of it all made me want to weep. The anguish of his life built inside my chest with a sharp, pulsing pain that would not go away. And I hated myself for pitying, even for a moment, this dreadful man.
'I've been so close,' I said to Kane, 'too often, so terribly close.'
'So have I,' he told me.
'Why?' I said to him. 'Why do we choose what we choose?'
Although it was falling colder, with many stars now stabbing their bright, twinkling swords through the sky's blackness, he plunged his fingers down through the crusty old snow and seized a handful of it to hold it against his forehead. Then he stared down into the Valley of the Swans as if listening to all the sounds of the world.
And he said to me, 'Two wolves fight within your heart now. One wolf is vengeful and howls with hate. The other wolf is compassionate and wise.'
'Yes, that is true,' I said, pressing my palm against my chest 'But which wolf will win the fight?'
'The one you feed.'
I, too, gazed down into the valley that had given me birth. The light of the stars and the rising moon showed a gentle and peaceful land of farm houses, fields and silent forests.
'So many dead,' I murmured, repeating these words like a chant. 'So many dead.'
Kane looked back at me and said, 'Sometimes the worst defeats open the door to the greatest victories.'
I rubbed the scar on my forehead against the hot; angry pain that burned into me there. 'You can say that because it wasn't your family that was lost.'
'All people are my family, Val.' Starlight rained down upon him, and his face seemed as sad and distant as the moon. 'And I've list them a thousand times a thousand generations.'
His dark eyes drank me in, and I gasped to behold the unfathomable depths inside him. Everything was there: whirling constellations and blazing suns and worlds without end. The growling of a lion devouring his prey half-alive and the scream of a woman giving birth to her son. The song of a child singing to a butterfly. He grabbed my hand of a sudden, hard, and smiled as he held on to me with all his might. Something passed into me then. Not his unquenchable will to life, but a calling and quickening of my own.
I did not know if suffering could truly leave the soul open to more joy. But, like fire, it could burn away all of a man's conceits, desires and delusions so that only a greater and deeper will remained. Somewhere, in the charred ruins inside me, in the deepest chamber of my heart, there was a light. It blazed with all my will toward the beautiful, the good, the true. And, unless I let it, it could never go out.
'So many stars,' I said, looking up at the sky.
Their soft radiance bathed the cairn and all its rings in a silvery shimmer. Light poured down upon the mountain and touched its luminous fingers to the white granite of the Elahad castle and the white stones marking the place along the Kurash River where we had put my mother and grandmother, and everyone else Morjin had slaughtered, into the earth.
'So many stars.'
If I did feed the compassionate wolf, I wondered, what would it be. Only love.
'Father,' I whispered. 'Mother.'
As softly as I could, I spoke the names of Nona, Karshur, Yarashan, Jonathay, Mandru and Ravar. And Asaru. I listened for their voices in the rising wind. And then, far below, a wolf called out its strange and beautiful song, and all my hatred left me.
I drew my sword then, and held it up toward the sky. It came alive with a light of its own, and it seemed both to feed the fire in the diamonds of the thousands of rings and to gather it back into itself. Alkaladur, the Sword of Sight, suddenly blazed as bright as the moon, the snow and the stars. And I saw, clearly, the whole design of my life, what I should have seen all along: tomorrow or the day following that, I would leave the Morning Mountains to seek the one they called the Lord of Light. My friends would come with me - all of them. As Kasandra had foretold, Estrella would show this Shining One to me, wherever he was. And then, some day, somehow, I would win back the Lightstone and place it in his hands.
We know, I thought, we always know.
And that was the great mystery of it all, that no matter our confusions and the lies we told ourselves, we always knew good from evil, right actions from wrong. And if only we had the courage to listen and follow our hearts, we might suffer or die, but we would never betray the great promise of life.
When I told this to Kane, he let loose a great howl of laughter and pressed the bag of astor seeds back into my hand. He leapt up, pulling me to my feet along with him. And he pointed above his head and told me, 'An eagle flies only as high as the sky. But a silver swan, reborn from its funeral pyre, flies to the stars.'
I could not share his joy at my decision. Tomorrow, I knew, or soon, in the days that were to come, I would hate again. I would kill, in fury, with my sacred sword. I would weep and rage and gnash my teeth at the terrible pain that would never go away. For that, too, was the mystery of life. But now I stood in the cold snow on top of a mountain in the deep of night. I felt the sighing of the fir trees below me and the very breath of the world rise in both mourning and exalta-tion. And then, for a moment, the souls of the dead bore me up like a great and beautiful swan toward the stars, and that was enough.
'Come,' Kane said to me, pulling at my hand. 'It's late and it's cold, and we've half a mile of a mountain to get down in the dark - it will go badly for us if we get lost.'
It was hardly dark, I th
ought. The moon illuminated Telshar's upper reaches and showed the track back down to our hut.
'We won't get lost,' I told him.
I bent to pick up the rope and tie it around my waist again. Then I turned to walk back down the mountain. I would wander my mother earth, always seeking my master, my brother, my other self who could hold the secret light in his hands. I would wander for a year or all the days of my life, never lost, knowing that the fiery and brilliant stars would always point the way.
The End
Continues With Book 3 of the Ea Cycle: Black Jade
Appendices
Heraldry
THE NINE KINGDOMS
The shield and surcoat arms of the warriors of the Nine Kingdoms differ from those of the other lands in two respects. First they tend to be simpler, with a single, bold charge emblazoned on a field of a single color. Second, every fighting man, from the simple warrior up through the ranks of knight, master and lord to the king himself, is entitled to bear the arms of his line.
There is no mark or insignia of service to any lord save the king. Loyalty to one's ruling king is displayed on shield borders as a field matching the color of the king's field, and a repeating motif of the king's charge. Thus, for instance, every fighting man of Ishka, from warrior to lord, will display a red shield border with white bears surrounding whatever arms have been passed down to him. With the exception of the lords of Anjo, only the kings and the royal families of the Nine Kingdoms bear unbordered shields and surcoats.
In Anjo, although a king in name still rules in Jathay, the lords of the other regions have broken away from his rule to assert their own sovereignty. Thus, for instance, Baron Yashur of Vishal bears a shield of simple green emblazoned with a white crescent moon without bordure as if were already a king or aspiring to be one.
Once there was a time when all Valari kings bore the seven stars of the Swan Contellation on their shields as a reminder of the Elijin and Galadin to whom they owed allegiance. But by the time of the Second Lightstone Quest, only the House of Elahad has as part of its emblem the seven silver stars.
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