The Diamond Warriors. David Zindell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ so!’ Lord Sharad said again. ‘Remember yourself, Lord Knight!’

      ‘I remember,’ Lord Noldashan said with a rising anger, ‘whole streams on the Culhadosh Commons running red with our warriors’ blood!’

      ‘Pfahh, blood!’ Sar Vikan spat out. ‘When has a true warrior been afraid of spilling it?’

      The moment that these words left Sar Vikan’s mouth, his face tightened in horror, as if he could not believe that he had spoken them. But it was too late. Quick as a bird, Lord Noldashan drew his sword five inches from its scabbard before Lord Avijan and others closed in and managed to clamp their hands around Lord Noldashan’s arm.

      ‘This warrior,’ Lord Noldashan said to Sar Vikan as he struggled against those who held him, ‘would not be afraid to see your blood spilled here!’

      His challenge filled my belly with a sickness as if I had eaten splinters of iron. As other warriors came up to restrain Sar Vikan from drawing his sword and setting off an inescapable duel, I felt many people looking at me. Maram and Master Juwain – and my other companions, too – were clearly distressed to witness things falling out so badly. I felt them wondering what I wondered: why had we returned to Mesh at all if we could not even keep my own countrymen from killing each other?

      ‘Stop!’ I called out to Lord Noldashan and Sar Vikan. ‘Let go of your swords! We are all one people here!’

      My voice fell upon them with the force of a battering ram, stunning them into motionlessness. But it did not, I sensed, touch their hearts.

      Lord Avijan finally let go of Lord Noldashan, and he said to me, ‘Lord Noldashan has cause for grieving and grievance, and few men more. And he raises an important question, Lord Elahad: is it your purpose to go against Morjin or to protect Mesh?’

      ‘But they are the same thing!’ I called out. ‘Mesh will never be safe so long as Morjin draws breath!’

      I looked around the hall at the tens of warriors weighing my words. The older ones such as Lord Noldashan and Lord Harsha, had grown to manhood in an era when the Sarni and the other Valari kingdoms posed the greatest threat to Mesh. They held a more cautious sentiment, shared by such prominent warriors as Lord Tanu: that Mesh had repelled Morjin once, and could again if we had to. They believed that the Dragon, as with bears, would be likely to leave us alone if we left him alone. Although they would fight like angels of battle, to use Lord Sharad’s words, if Morjin did try to invade our land again, they had no liking to march out of Mesh to make war against him. Others, such as Lord Avijan, desired vengeance for Morjin’s desecration of Mesh and believed that he must somehow be defeated, though they, too, feared to seek him out and bring him to battle. A smaller number of men – and these were mostly younger knights such as Joshu Kadar, Sar Shivalad and their friends – burned with the fever of our generation to annihilate Morjin from the face of the earth and make the world anew.

      ‘Morjin,’ I finally said to Lord Avijan, and to everyone, ‘must be destroyed. How that is to be remains unclear. But until he is destroyed, we will never bring peace to the world.’

      ‘You’ Lord Noldashan said to me, ‘if we follow you, will bring only death.’

      I could tell from the grave faces of such prominent warriors as Lord Kanshar and Sar Juladar, even Lord Harsha, that many of the men gathered in the hall feared that Lord Noldashan had spoken truly – as I feared it even more. But I must, I thought, at all costs hide my disquiet. The gazes of a hundred warriors burned into me, and I thought that I must gaze right back at them, bravely and boldly, and betray not the slightest doubt or hesitation. Every moment that I stood among them, in field, forest or a great lord’s castle, with my every word or gesture, I must surround myself as with a gleaming shield of invincibility. How, I wondered, was this possible? How had my father ever managed to last a single day as king?

      Lord Noldashan stared straight at me, and continued his indictment: ‘You would bring death, I think, Lord Elahad. Even as you brought it to Tria – and so destroyed all hope of an alliance of the Valari. And without an alliance, how could you ever hope to destroy the Red Dragon?’

      In Tria, I thought, we had been so close to uniting. The Valari kings had nearly had the very stars within their grasp. But in the end, I had failed them.

      ‘How many of our warriors fell at the Great Battle?’ Lord Noldashan went on. ‘How many of our women and children died at the Red Dragon’s command?’

      From somewhere in the hall I caught a sense of the great darkness that pulled me always down. Again, I saw my mother and grandmother nailed to planks of wood. And again, I saw a great grassland covered with tens of thousands of broken and bleeding bodies.

      ‘How many, Lord Elahad?’ Lord Noldashan asked me. ‘How many of our people must die for your impossible dream?’

      I tried to speak then, but I could not, and so I took a sip of beer to moisten my bone-dry throat. Then I looked at Sar Jonavar standing in close to his father, and I said to Lord Noldashan, ‘You had another son, didn’t you? Did he fall at the Commons?’

      ‘He fell before the Great Battle,’ Lord Noldashan told me. ‘If that is the right word. For in truth, Morjin’s men crucified him.’

      Many standing in the hall knew the story that Lord Noldashan now told me: that when Morjin’s army had invaded and laid waste the Lake Country, Lord Noldashan’s two sons had been out on a hunting trip in the mountains to the north. After waiting as long as he could for them to come home, Lord Noldashan finally rode off to join the gathering of the warriors. But Televar and Sar Jonavar had never received my father’s call to arms. They returned to find that Morjin’s army had swept through the Lake Country, and that Morjin’s men were about to burn their farm to the ground. The two brothers then fell mad. In the ensuing battle, Morjin’s soldiers captured both of them – along with Lord Noldashan’s wife and two daughters. They crucified all of them, and left them for the vultures. Two days later, after Morjin’s army had moved on, a neighbor had found Lord Noldashan’s family nailed to crosses. Miraculously, Sar Jonavar still lived. The neighbor then summoned help to pull Sar Jonavar down from his cross and tend his wounds until Lord Noldashan could return.

      As Lord Noldashan finished recounting this terrible story, his raspy voice choked up almost to a whisper. I did not know what to say to him. I did not want to look at him just then.

      ‘Once they called you the Maitreya,’ he said to me. ‘But can you bring back the dead? Can you keep my remaining son from joining the rest of my family?’

      He doubts, I thought, feeling my heart moving inside me like a frightened rabbit, because I doubt – and that is the curse of the valarda. But how can I not doubt?

      How could I, I wondered, ever defeat Morjin if I first must accomplish an impossible thing? The most dreadful thing in all the world that I could not quite bring myself to see?

      I finally managed to make myself face Lord Noldashan. In the anguish filling up his moist, black eyes, I saw my own life. Then a brightness blazed within me again. In truth, it had never gone out. I remembered how, in Hesperu, in the most terrible of moments, Bemossed had clasped my hand in his and looked deep inside me as if he could behold the brightest light in all the universe.

      ‘You have spoken of the dead,’ I said to Lord Noldashan. ‘And we have walked with the dead, you and I.’

      I looked around at the hall’s stone walls, hung with banners and shields and the heads of various animals that СКАЧАТЬ