The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One. David Zindell

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СКАЧАТЬ of course, was the first to finish his beer. He gulped it down like a hound does milk. Then he held out his goblet for Lord Harsha to fill it again and said, ‘Now I would like to propose a toast. To the lords and knights of Mesh who have fought faithfully for their King.’

      ‘Excellent,’ Lord Harsha said, once more filling Maram’s goblet. ‘Let’s drink to that indeed.’

      Again Maram drained his cup. He licked the froth from his mustache. He held the empty cup out yet again and said, ‘And now, ah, to the courage and prowess of the warriors – how do you say it? To flawlessness and fearlessness.’

      But Lord Harsha stoppered the cask with a cork, and said, ‘No, that’s enough if you’re going hunting today – we can’t have you young princes shooting arrows at each other, can we?’

      ‘But, Lord Harsha,’ Maram protested, ‘I was only going to suggest that the courage of your Meshian warriors is an inspiration to those of us who can only hope to –’

      ‘You’re quite the diplomat,’ Lord Harsha said, laughing as he cut Maram off. ‘Perhaps you should reason with the Ishkans. Perhaps you could talk them out of this war as easily as you talked me out of my beer.’

      ‘I don’t understand why there has to be a war at all,’ Maram said.

      ‘Well, there’s bad blood between us,’ Lord Harsha said simply.

      ‘But it’s the same blood, isn’t it? You’re all Valari, aren’t you?’

      ‘Yes, the same blood,’ Lord Harsha said, slowly sipping from his goblet. Then he looked at me sadly. ‘But the Ishkans shed it in ways shameful to any Valari. The way they killed Valashu’s grandfather.’

      ‘But he died in battle, didn’t he? Ah, the Battle of the Diamond River?’

      Now Lord Harsha swallowed the last of his beer as if someone had forced him to drink blood. He tapped his eye-patch and said, ‘Yes, it was at the Diamond. Twelve years ago now. That’s where the Ishkans took this eye. That’s where the Ishkans sacrificed five companies just to close with King Elkamesh and kill him.’

      ‘But that’s war, isn’t it?’ Maram asked.

      ‘No, that’s dueling. The Ishkans hated King Elkamesh because when he was a young man such as yourself, he killed Lord Dorje in a duel. And so they used the battle as a duel to take their revenge.’

      ‘Lord Dorje,’ I explained, looking at Maram, ‘was King Hadaru’s oldest brother.’

      ‘I see,’ Maram said. ‘And this duel took place, ah, fifty years ago? You Valari wait a long time to take your revenge.’

      I looked north toward the dark clouds moving in from Ishka’s mountains, and I lost myself in memories of wrongs and hurts that went back more than a hundred times fifty years.

      ‘Please do not say “we Valari,”’ Lord Harsha told Maram. He rubbed his broken knee and said, ‘Sar Lensu of Waas caught me here with his mace, and that’s war. There’s no vengeance to be taken. They understand that in Waas. They would never have tried to kill King Elkamesh as the Ishkans did.’

      While Lord Harsha rose abruptly and shook out the cloth of its crumbs for the sparrows to eat, I clenched my teeth together. And then I said, ‘There was more to it than vengeance.’

      At this, Asaru shot me a quick look as if warning me not to divulge family secrets in front of strangers. But I spoke not only for Maram’s benefit, but for Asaru’s and Lord Harsha’s and my own.

      ‘My grandfather,’ I said, ‘had a dream. He would have united all the Valari against Morjin.’

      At the mention of this name, dreadful and ancient, Lord Harsha froze motionless while Joshu Kadar turned to stare at me. I felt fear fluttering in Maram’s belly like a blackbird’s wings. In the sky, the dark, distant clouds seemed to grow even darker.

      And then Asaru’s voice grew as cold as steel as it always did when he was angry at me. ‘The Ishkans,’ he said, ‘don’t want the Valari united under our banner. No one does, Val.’

      I looked up to see a few crows circling the field in search of carrion or other easy feasts. I said nothing.

      ‘You have to understand,’ Asaru continued, ‘there’s no need.’

      ‘No need?’ I half-shouted. ‘Morjin’s armies swallow up half the continent, and you say there’s no need?’

      I looked west beyond the white diamond peak of Telshar as I tried to imagine the earthshaking events occurring far away. What little news of Morjin’s acquisitions that had arrived in our isolated country was very bad. From his fastness of Sakai in the White Mountains, this warlock and would-be Lord of Ea had sent armies to conquer Hesperu and lands with strange names such as Uskudar and Karabuk. The enslaved peoples of Acadu, of course, had long since marched beneath the banner of the Red Dragon, while in Surrapam and Yarkona, and even in Eanna, Morjin’s spies and assassins worked to undermine those realms from within. His terror had found its most recent success in Galda. The fall of this mighty kingdom, so near the Morning Mountains and Mesh, had shocked almost all of the free peoples from Delu to Thalu. But not the Meshians. Nor the Ishkans, the Kaashans, nor any of the other Valari.

      ‘Morjin will never conquer us,’ Asaru said proudly. ‘Never.’

      ‘He’ll never conquer us if we stand against him,’ I said.

      ‘No army has ever successfully invaded the Nine Kingdoms.’

      ‘Not successfully,’ I agreed. ‘But why should we invite an invasion at all?’

      ‘If anyone invades Mesh,’ Asaru said, ‘we’ll cut them to pieces. The way the Kaashans cut Morjin’s priests to pieces.’

      He was referring to the grisly events that had occurred half a year before in Kaash, that most mountainous and rugged of all Valari kingdoms. When King Talanu discovered that two of his most trusted lords had entered Morjin’s secret order of assassin-priests, he had ordered them beheaded and quartered. The pieces of their bodies he had then sent to each of the Nine Kingdoms as a warning against traitors and others who would serve Morjin.

      I shuddered as I remembered the day that King Talanu’s messenger had arrived with his grisly trophy in Silvassu. Something sharp stabbed into my chest as I thought of worse things. In Galda, thousands of men and women had been put to the sword. Some few survivors of the massacres there had found their way across the steppes to Mesh, only to be turned away at the passes. Their sufferings were grievous but not unique. The rattle of the chains of all those enslaved by Morjin would have shaken the mountains, if any had ears to hear it. On the Wendrush, it was said, the Sarni tribes were on the move again and roasting their captured enemies alive. From Karabuk had come stories of a terrible new plague and even a rumor that a city had been burned with a firestone. It seemed that all of Ea was going up in flames while here we sat by a small green field drinking beer and talking of yet another war with the Ishkans.

      ‘There’s more to the world than Mesh,’ I said. I listened to the twittering of the birds in the forest. ‘What of Eanna and Yarkona? What of Alonia? The Elyssu? And Delu?’

      At the mention of his homeland, Maram stood up and grabbed his bow. Despite his renunciation of war, he shook it bravely СКАЧАТЬ