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

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      ‘We are the Telamun,’ he explained to us as we broke from our journey to take a meal with his family. ‘And once we were a great people.’

      He told us that only a few generations before, the Telamun in their two great tribes had ruled this land. So great was their prowess at arms that the Kings in Imatru had feared to send their armies here. But then, after a blood-feud brought about by a careless insult, murder and an escalating sequence of revenge killings, the two tribes had gone to war against each other rather than with their common enemies. In the space of only twenty years, they had nearly wiped each other out.

      ‘A few dozen families like ours, we’re all that’s left,’ Jacarun said as he held up his drover’s staff and swept it out across the plain. ‘Now we’ve given up war – unless you count beating off wolves with sticks as war.’

      He went on to say that their days as a free people were almost over, for others were now eyeing his family’s ancient lands and even moving into them.

      ‘King Hanniban has been having trouble with his barons, it’s said, so hasn’t yet been able to muster the few companies that it would take to conquer us,’ he told us. ‘But some of the Ravirii have come up from the Red Desert – they butchered a family not fifty miles from here. And the Yarkonans, well, in the long run, they’re the real threat, of course. Count Ulanu of Aigul – they call him Ulanu the Handsome – has it in mind to conquer all of Yarkona in the Red Dragon’s name and set himself up as King. If he ever does, he’ll turn his gaze west and send his crucifiers here.’

      He called for one of his daughters to bring us some roasted beef. And then, after fixing his weary old eyes on Kane and my other friends, he looked at me and asked, ‘And where are you bound, Sar Valashu?’

      ‘To Yarkona,’ I said.

      ‘Aha, I thought so! To the Library at Khaisham, yes?’

      ‘How did you know?’

      ‘Well, you’re not the first pilgrims to cross our lands on their way to the Library, though you may be the last.’ He sighed as he lifted his staff toward the sky. ‘There was a time, and not so long ago, when many pilgrims came this way. We always charged them tribute for their safe passage, not much, only a little silver and sometimes a few grains of gold. But those days are past; soon it is we who will have to pay tribute for living here. In any case, no one goes to Yarkona anymore – it’s an accursed land.’

      He advised us that, if we insisted on completing our journey, we should avoid Aigul and Count Ulanu’s demesne at all costs.

      We ate our roasted beef then, and washed it down with some fermented milk that Jacarun called laas. After visiting with his family and admiring the fatness of their cattle – and restraining Maram from doing likewise with their women – we thanked Jacarun for his hospitality and set out again.

      Soon the steppe, which had gradually been drying out as we drew further away from the Crescent Mountains, grew quite sere. The greens of its grasses gave way to yellow and umber and more somber tones. Many new shrubs found root here in the rockier soil: mostly bitterbroom and yusage, as Kane named these tough-looking plants. They gave shelter to lizards, thrashers, rock sparrows and other animals that I had never seen before. As the sun fell down the long arc of the sky behind us in its journey into night, it grew slightly warmer instead of cooler. We put quite a few miles behind us, though not so many as on the four preceding afternoons. The horses, perhaps sensing that they would find less water and food to the east, began moving more slowly as if to conserve their strength. And as we approached the land that Jacarun had warned us against, we turned our gazes inward to look for strength of our own.

      And then, just before dusk, with the sun casting its longest rays over a glowing, reddened land, we came to a little trickle of water that Kane called the Parth. From its sandy banks, we looked out on the distant rocky outcroppings of Yarkona. There, I prayed, we would at last find the end of our journey and our hearts’ deepest desire.

       2

      The moon that night was just past full and tinged a glowing red. It hung low in conjunction with a blazing twist of stars that some called the Snake Constellation and others the Dragon.

      ‘Blood Moon in the Dragon,’ Master Juwain said. He sat sipping his tea and looking up at the sky. ‘I haven’t seen suchlike in many years.’

      He brought out his book then, and sat reading quietly by the firelight, perhaps looking for some passage that would comfort him and turn his attention away from the stars. And then Liljana, who had gone off to wash the dishes in a small stream that led back to the Parth, returned holding some stones in her hand. They were black and shiny like Kane’s gelstei but had more the look of melted glass. Liljana called them Angels’ Tears; she said that wherever they were found, the earth would weep with the sorrow of the heavens. Atara gazed at these three, droplike stones as she might her much clearer crystal. Although her eyes darkened and I felt a great heaviness descend upon her heart like a stormcloud, she, too, sat quietly sipping her tea and saying nothing.

      We slept uneasily that night, and Kane didn’t sleep at all. He stood for hours keeping watch, looking for lions in the shadows of the moon-reddened rocks or enemies approaching across the darkling plain. Alphanderry, who couldn’t sleep either, brought out his mandolet and sang to keep him company. And unseen by him, Flick spun only desultorily to his music. He seemed to want to hide from the bloody moon above us.

      And so the hours of night passed, and the heavens turned slowly about the rutilant earth. When morning came, we had a better look at this harsher country into which we had ventured. Yarkona, Master Juwain said, meant the ‘Green Land’, but there was little of this hue about it. Neither true steppe nor quite desert, the sparse grass here was burnt brown by a much hotter sun. The yusage had been joined by its even tougher cousins: ursage and spiny sage, whose spiked leaves discouraged the brush voles and deer from browsing upon them. We saw a few of these cautious animals in the early light, framed by some blackish cliffs to the east. These sharp prominences had a charred look about them, as if the sun had set fire to the very stone. But Kane said their color came from the basalt that formed them; the rocks, he told us, were the very bones of the earth, which the hot winds blowing up from the south had laid bare.

      He also told us that we had made camp in Sagaram, a domain that some local lord had carved out of this once-great realm perhaps a century before. We looked to him for knowledge that might help us cross it. But as he admitted, he had come this way many years ago, in more peaceful times. Since then, he said, the boundaries of Yarkona’s little baronies and possessions had no doubt shifted like a desert’s sands, perhaps some of them having been blown away by war altogether.

      ‘Aigul lies some sixty miles from here to the north and east,’ he told us. ‘Unless it has grown since then, and its counts have annexed lands to the south.’

      These lands we set out to cross on that dry, windy morning. Sagaram proved to be little more than a thin strip of shrubs and sere grasses running seventy or so miles along the Parth. By early afternoon, we had made our way clear into the next domain, although no river or stone marked the border, and we didn’t realize it at the time. It took some more miles of plodding across the hot, rising plain before we found anyone who could give us directions. This was a goatherd who lived in a little stone house by a well in sight of a rather striking rock formation to the east of us.

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