The Lightstone: The Silver Sword: Part Two. David Zindell

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      After we had laid our sleeping furs on the dry straw in the barn, Jaetan’s mother, Kandra, insisted on calling us into the house for a meal, even as we had feared. But as they had nothing more than a few eggs, some blackberry jam and flour to be baked into bread, our dinner was a long time in coming. Kane solved the problem of our eating up Toman’s family’s reserves in the most spectacular manner: as he had with Meliadus, he grabbed up his bow and stole off into the darkening woods. A half hour later, he returned with a young buck slung across his broad shoulders. It was a great feat of hunting, Kandra exclaimed, especially so considering that the forest hereabouts had been nearly emptied of deer.

      And so we had a feast that night and everyone was happy. Kandra kept the remains of the deer, which more than made up for the bread that she baked us. In the morning, we set out well fed, with Jaetan leading the way on a bony-looking old nag that was a little too big for him.

      After a couple of hours of riding up a gradually ascending dirt road, we came to a notch between two hills where the road seemed to disappear into a great, green wall of vegetation. Jaetan pointed into it and told us, ‘This is the old East Road. It’s said to lead into Eanna. But no one really knows because no one goes that way anymore.’

      ‘Except us,’ Maram muttered nervously.

      Jaetan looked at him and told him, ‘The road is good enough, I think. But you should be careful of the bears, Master Maram. It’s said that there are still many bears in the mountains.’

      ‘Oh, excellent,’ Maram said, staring into the woods. ‘Bears, is it now?’

      We thanked Jaetan for his hospitality, and then he turned to Kane and asked, ‘If you ever come back this way, will you teach me to hunt, sir?’

      ‘That I will,’ Kane promised as he reached out to rumple the boy’s hair. ‘That I will.’

      With a few backward glances, Jaetan then rode back toward his grandfather’s house and the warmth of the hearth that awaited him.

      ‘Well,’ Maram said, ‘if the old maps are right, we’ve sixty miles of mountains to cross before we reach Eanna. I suppose we’d better start out before the bears catch our scent.’

      But we saw no sign of bears all that day, nor the next nor even the one following that. The woods about us, though, were thick enough to have hidden a hundred of them. As the hills to either side of us rose and swelled into mountains, the giant trees of western Surrapam gave way to many more silver firs and nobles. These graceful evergreens, while not so tall as their lowland cousins, grew more densely. If not for the road, we would have been hard pressed to fight our way through them. This narrow muddy track had been cut along a snakelike course. And it turned like a snake, now curving south, now north, but always making its way roughly east as it gradually gained elevation. And with every thousand feet higher upon the green, humped earth on which we stood, it seemed that the rain poured down harder and the air fell colder.

      Making camp in these misty mountains was very much a misery. The needles of the conifers, the bushes, the mosses and ferns about our soaked sleeping furs – everything the eye and hand fell upon was dripping wet. That Maram failed yet again with his fire dispirited us even more. When the day’s first light fought its way through the almost solid grayness lying over the drenched earth each morning, we were glad to get moving again, if only because our exertions warmed our stiff bodies.

      Three times the road failed us, vanishing into a mass of vegetation that seemed to swallow it completely. And three times Maram complained that we were lost and would never see the sun again, let alone Khaisham.

      But each time, with an unerring sense, Atara struck off into the forest, leading us through the trees for a half mile or more until we found the road again. It was as if she could see much of the path that lay before us. It made me wonder if her powers of scrying were much greater than she let on.

      On the fourth day of our mountain crossing, we had a stroke of luck. The rain stopped, the sky cleared, and the bright sun shone down upon us and warmed the world. The needles of the trees and the bushes’ leaves, still wet with rain, shimmered as if covered with millions of drops of melting diamonds. Two thousand feet above us, the trees were frosted with snow. For the first time, we had a good view of the great peaks around us. Snow and ice covered these spurs of rock, which pushed up into the blue sky to the north and south of us. Our little road led between them; the ground that we still had to cross, as we could see, was not really a gap in the mountains, but only a stretch where they rose less high. Although we had covered a good thirty miles, as the raven flies, we still had heights to climb and as many more miles before us.

      We broke then for our midday meal in a sparkling glade by a little lake. Maram, who still had his talent with flint and steel, struck up a fire, which Liljana used to roast a rock goat that Atara had managed to shoot. After some days of cold cheese and battle biscuits, we were all looking forward to this feast. While the meat was cooking, Maram discovered a downed tree-trunk, hollowed and swarming with bees.

      ‘Ah, honeycomb,’ he said to me as he pointed at the trunk and licked his lips. ‘I can smell the honey in that hive.’

      I watched from a safe distance as he built up another fire from wet twigs to smoke the bees out of their home. It took quite some time, and many blows of the axe, but he finally pulled out a huge, sticky mass of waxen comb dripping with golden honey. That he suffered only a dozen stings from his robbery amazed me.

      ‘You’re brave enough when you want to be,’ I said to him as he handed me a piece of comb. I licked a little honey from it. It was incredibly good, tasting of thousands of sun-drenched blossoms.

      ‘Ah, I’d take a thousand stings for honey,’ he said before cramming into his mouth a huge chunk of comb. ‘In all the world, there’s nothing sweeter except a woman.’

      He rubbed some honey over the stings along his hands and face, and then we returned to the others to share this treasure.

      We all gorged on the succulent goat meat and honey, Maram most of all. After he had finished stuffing his belly, he fell asleep on top of the dewed bracken near some thick bushes that Kane called pink spira. The rays of sun playing over his honey-smeared face showed a happy man.

      We let him finish his nap while we broke our makeshift camp. After our waterbags had all been filled and the horses packed, we made ready to mount them and ride back to the road. And then, just as Liljana pointed out that it wouldn’t do to leave Maram sleeping, we heard him murmuring behind us as if dreaming: ‘Ah, Lailaiu, so soft, so sweet.’

      I turned to go fetch him, but immediately stopped dead in my tracks. For what my eyes beheld then, my mind wouldn’t quite believe: There, across the glade, in a break in the bushes above Maram and bending over him, crouched a large, black she-bear. She had her long, shiny snout pressed down into Maram’s face as she licked his lips and beard with her long, pink tongue. She seemed rather content lapping up the smears of honey that the careless Maram had left clinging there. And all the while, Maram murmured in his half-sleep, ‘Lailaiu, ah, Lailaiu.’

      I might have fallen down laughing at my friend’s very mistaken bliss. But bears, after all, were bears. I couldn’t imagine how this one had stolen out of the bushes upon Maram without either Kane or the horses taking notice. As it was midsummer, I feared that she had young cubs nearby.

      Slowly and quietly, I reached out to tap on the elbow of Kane, who had his back to the bear as he tightened the cinch of his horse. When he turned to see what I was looking at, his black eyes lit up with many emotions at once: concern, hilarity, contempt, outrage and blood-lust. Quick as a wink, he drew СКАЧАТЬ