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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ the horses, too. Altaru, facing the wind, finally turned to see the bear; he suddenly reared up as he let loose a tremendous whinny. Liljana’s gelding and Master Juwain’s sorrel, Iolo and Fire – all the horses added their voices to the great chorus of challenge and panic splitting the air. We had all we could do to keep hold of their reins and prevent them from running off. With Kane’s bay stamping about and threatening to split his skull with a flying hoof, he couldn’t get off a shot. And it was good that he didn’t. For just as Maram finally awakened and looked up with wide eyes into the hairy face of his new lover, the bear started at the sudden noise and peered across the glade as if seeing us for the first time. She seemed more astonished than we were. It took her only a moment to gather her legs beneath her and bound off into the bushes.

      ‘Oh, my Lord!’ Maram called out upon realizing what had happened. He sprang up and raced to the lake’s edge, where he knelt to wash his face. Then he said, ‘Oh, my Lord – I was nearly eaten!’

      Atara, keeping an eye out for the bear’s return, walked up to him and poked a finger into his big belly. ‘Hmmph, you’re half a bear yourself. I’ve never seen anyone eat honey the way that you do. But the next time, perhaps you should be more careful how you eat it.’

      That day we climbed to the greatest heights of our mountain crossing. This was a broad saddle between two great peaks, where lush meadows alternated with spire-like conifers. Thousands of wildflowers in colors from blazing pink to indigo brightened the sides of the road. Marmots and pikas grazed there, and looked at us as if they had never seen our kind before. But as they fed upon the grasses and seeds they found among the flowers, they kept a close watch for the eagles and ravens who hunted them. We watched them, too. Maram wondered if the Great Beast could seize the souls of these circling birds and turn them into ghuls as he had the bear at the beginning of our journey.

      ‘Do you think he’s watching us, Val?’ Maram asked me. ‘Do you think he can see us?’

      I stopped to draw my sword and watch it glow along the line to the east. Its fire was of a faint white. In the journey from Swan Island, I had noticed that other things beside the Lightstone caused it to shine. In the glint of the stars, its radiance was more silver, while the stillness of my soul seemed to produce a clearer and brighter light.

      ‘It’s strange,’ I said, ‘but ever since Lady Nimaiu gave me this blade, the Lord of Lies seems unable to see me, even in my dreams.’

      I looked up at a great, golden eagle gliding along the mountain wind, and I said, ‘There’s no evil in these creatures, Maram. If they’re watching, it’s only because they’re afraid of us.’

      My words seemed to reassure him, and we began our descent through the eastern half of the Crescent Range with good courage. For another three days, beneath the strong mountain sun, we rode on without incident. The road held true, taking us down the folded slopes and around the curve of lesser peaks. As we lost elevation and made our way east, the land grew drier, the forest more open. We crossed broad bands of white oak and ponderosa pine, interspersed with balsamroot and phlox and other smaller plants. Many of the birds and animals who lived here were strange to me. There was a chipmunk with yellow stripes and a bluejay who ate acorns. We saw four more bears, smaller and of a grayish hue to their fur that lent them great dignity. They must have wondered why we hurried through their domain when the glories of the earth in midsummer ripened all around us.

      And then, on the first day of Soal, with most of the great Crescent Range at our backs, we came out of a cleft in the foothills to see a vast plain opening to the east. It was like a sea of grass, yellow-green, and colored with deeper green lines where trees grew along the winding watercourses. Another hour’s journey down some slopes of ponderosa pine and rocky ridges would take us down into it.

      ‘Eanna,’ Kane said, pointing down into this lovely land. ‘At least, this was once part of the ancient kingdom. But we’re far from Imatru, and I doubt if King Hanniban holds any sway here.’

      What peoples or lords we might find in the realm below us, he didn’t know. But he admonished us to be wary, for out on the plain we would have no cover, either from men or the wolves and lions who hunted the antelope there.

      ‘Wolves!’ Maram exclaimed. ‘Lions! – I think I’d rather keep company with the bears.’

      But all that first day of our journey across Eanna, neither his fears nor Kane’s took form to bring us harm. We left the road only a couple of miles from the mountains. It turned south, whether toward some lost city in this pretty country or toward nowhere, none of us could say. The Red Desert, Kane told us, lay not so very far in that direction, and its drifting vermilion sands and dunes had swallowed up more than one city over the millennia. We were lucky, he said, that Alkaladur seemed to point us along a path above this endless wasteland, for other than the fierce tribes of the Ravirii, no one could survive the desert’s murderous sun for very long.

      As it was, we felt a whiff of its heat even hundreds of miles north of the heart of it. But after the freezing rains of the mountains, we welcomed this sudden warming of the air, for it was dry like the breath of the stars and clean, and did not smother us. It did not last long, either, giving way soon after noon to gentle breezes that swept through the swaying grasses and touched our faces with the scents of strange new plants and flowers. And at night, beneath the constellations that hung in the heavens like a brilliant, blazing tapestry, it fell quite cool – not so much that it chilled our bones, but rather that bracing crispness that sharpens all the senses and invites the marvel of the infinite.

      We all slept quite well through that first dark out on the steppe – except during those hours when we were standing watch or simply gazing up at the stars from our beds on top of the long grass. The moon rose over the world like a gleaming half-shield; beneath it, from far out across the luminous earth, wolves howled and lions roared. I dreamed of these animals that night, and of eagles and falcons, and great silver swans that flew so high they caught the fire of the stars. When I awoke in the morning to a sky so blue that it seemed to go on forever, I felt this fire in me, warming my heart and calling me to journey forth toward the completion of our quest.

      We rode hard all that day and the next, and the two following that. Although I worried we might press the horses too strenuously, they took great strength from the grass all around us, both in its sweet smell and in the bellyfuls they bit off and ate at midday and night. After many days of picking their way up and down steep mountain tracks studded with sharp rocks, they seemed glad for the feel of soft earth beneath their hooves. It was their pleasure to keep moving across the windy steppe, at a fast walk and sometimes at a canter or even a gallop. I felt my excitement flowing into Altaru and firing up his great heart, and his delight in running unbound across the wild and open steppe passing back into me. Sometimes he raced Iolo or Fire just for the sheer singing joy of it. And at such moments, I realized that our souls were free, and each of us knew this in the surging of our blood and our breaths upon the wind – and in the promises we made to ourselves.

      It was hard for me, used to the more circumscribed horizons of mountainous or wooded country, to see just how far we traveled each day. But Atara had a better eye for distances here. She put the tally at a good fifty miles. So it was that we crossed almost the whole length of southern Eanna in very little time. And in all that wide land, dotted with cottonwood trees whose silver-green leaves were nearly as beautiful as astors’, we saw almost no people.

      ‘I should think someone would live here,’ Liljana said on the fifth morning of our journey across the steppe. ‘This is a fair land – it can’t be the wolves that have scared them away. Nor even the lions.’

      Later that day, toward noon, we came across some nomads who solved the mystery of Eanna’s emptiness for us. The head of the thirty members of this band, who lived in tents woven from the hair of the shaggy СКАЧАТЬ