The Lightstone

Chapter 15

Our vision of the Timpum did not fade with the coining of the new day. If anything, in the fullness of the sunlight, their fiery forms seemed only brighter. It was impossible to look at them very long and imagine a life without them.

After a delicious breakfast of fruits and nutbread, Atara and I held council with Master Juwain and Maram. We stood by a stream not far from our house, inhaling the fragrance of cherry blossoms and marveling at the splendor of the woods.

'We must decide what to do,' I said to them. 'By my count, tomorrow will be the first of Soldru, and that gives us only seven more days to reach Tria.'

'Ah, but do we even want to go to Tria?' Maram asked as he stared at an astor sapling. That is the question.'

'There's very much to be learned here,' Master Juwain agreed. 'Very much more still to be seen.'

Atara smiled, and her eyes shone like diamonds. She said. 'That's true – and I would like to see it. But I've pledged myself to journey to Tria, and so I must go.'

'Perhaps we could stay here only a few more days,' Maram said. 'Or a few more months. Tria will still be there in Ioj or Valte.'

'But we would miss the calling of the quest,' Atara said.

'So what if we do? The Lightstone has been lost for three thousand years, likely it will remain lost for three more months.'

'Unless, by chance,' I said, 'some knight finds it first'

'By a miracle, that would be,' Maram said.

I pointed at the crown of lights that had floated from the top of my head and now hovered nearby over a blackberry bush. There, among the little ripe fruits, twinkled many Timpum that looked something like fireflies.

'Does it seem to you that the world lacks miracles?' I asked.

'No, perhaps it doesn't,' he admitted. His large eyes gleamed as if he were intoxicated – not with wine or even women but with pure fire.

'There's one miracle that I would like explained,' Master Juwain said to me. 'What happened last night between you and Atara?'

I looked at Atara a long moment before she answered him. 'After I ate the timana,' she said, 'I saw the Timpum almost immediately. It was like a flash of fire. It was so beautiful that I wanted to hold it forever – but can one hold the sun? I felt myself burning up like a leaf caught in the flames. And then I couldn't breathe, and I thought I was dying. Everything was so cold. It was like I had been buried alive in a crystal cave, so cold and hard, and every-thing growing darker. I would have died if Val hadn't come to take me back.'

'And how did he do that?' Master Juwain asked.

Again, Atara looked at me, and she said, 'I'm still not sure. Somehow I felt what he felt for me. All his love, his life – I felt it breaking open the cave like lightning and burning into me.'

Now Master Juwain and Maram looked at me, too, as the bluebirds sang and the Timpum glittered all about us. And Master Juwain said, 'That sounds like the valarda.'

Master Juwain's use of this word, utterly unexpected, fell out of the air like lightning and nearly broke me open. How did he know the name of my gift that Morjin had spoken to me? For many miles, I had wondered about this strange name, as I wondered about Master Juwain now. But he just smiled at me in his kindly but proud way, as if he knew almost everything there was to know.

It seemed that the time had finally come to explain about my gift, which they had already suspected lay behind my sensing of the Stonefaces and the other strangenesses of my life. And so I told them everything about it. I said that I had been born breathing in others' sufferings and their joys as well. I revealed my dream of Morjin and how he had prophesied that one day I would use my gift to make others feel my pain.

'It would appear,' Master Juwain said, looking from Atara to me, 'that you also have the power to make people feel much else.'

'Perhaps,' I said. 'But this is the first time this has happened. It's hard to know if it could ever happen again.'

'You say you are able to close yourself to others' emotions. Then surely it follows that you should be able to open them to yours.'

'Perhaps,' I said again. I didn't tell him that in order to do this, first I would have to open myself to the passions that blazed inside me, and that this was more terrifying than facing a naked sword.

'You should have come to us long ago,' Master Juwain told me. 'I'm sure we would have been able to help you.'

'Do you really think so?'

The Brotherhoods taught meditation and music, herbology and heal-ing and many other things, but so far as I knew they knew nothing of this sense that both blessed and tormented me.

'Your gift is very rare, Val, but not unique. I read about it in a book years ago. I'm sure that there must be other books that could instruct you in its development and use.'

'Does one learn to play the flute from a book?' I asked him. I shook my head and smiled sadly. 'No, unless there is another who shares my affliction, there is only one thing that can help me.'

'You mean the Lights'tone, don't you?'

'Yes, the Lightstone – it's said to be the cup of healing.'

If I could feel the fires that burned wide others and touch them with my own, then surely that meant there was a wound in my soul that allowed these sacred and very private flames to pass back and forth. This one time, perhaps, they had touched Atara and brought her back from the darkness. But what if the next time, through rage or hate, whatever was inside me flashed like real lightning and struck her dead?

Maram, who always understood so much without being told, came up to me and placed his hand above my heart. 'I think that this gift of yours must be like living with a hole in your chest. But Pualani healed you of the wound that Salmelu made.

Perhaps she can heal this wound, too.'

Later that day, I went to Pualani's house to ask her about this. And there, inside a long door garlanded with white and purple flowers, she took my hand and told me,

'In the world, there are many sights that are hard to bear. Would you wish to be healed of the holes in your eyes so that you didn't have to see them?'

She went on to say that my wound, as I thought of it, was surely the gift of the Ellama. I must learn to use it, she said, as I would my eyes, my ears, my nose or any other part of me. If finding the Lightstone would help me in this, then I should seek it with all my heart.

That night in our house, I told Maram and Master Juwain that I must leave for Tria the next day.

'There will be knights from all the free kingdoms there,' I explained. 'Scryers and minstrels, too. One of them might tell of a crucial clue that would lead to the Lightstone.'

'I agree,' Atara said. 'In any case, King Kiritan will call all the questers to make vows together, and we should be there to receive his blessings.'

Master Juwain saw the sense of both these arguments, and agreed that we should all continue on to Tria together. Maram, when he saw that our minds were made up, reluctantly said that he would come with us as well.

'If you go without me,' he said, 'I'll never find either the strength or courage to leave these woods.' 'But what about Iolana?' I asked him. 'Don't you love her?' 'Ah, of course I do,' he said. 'I love the wine that the Lokilani serve, too. But there are many fine wines in the world, if you know what I mean.'

Maram's fickleness obviously vexed Atara, who said, 'I know little of wines. But there can't be another fruit on all of Ea like the timana.'

'And that is my point exactly,' Maram said. 'When I find the one wine that is to lesser vintages as the timana is to the more common fruits, I shall drink it and no other.'

The next morning I put on my cold armor and told Pualani that we would be leaving.

After we had burdened the pack horses with a good load of fruit and freshly baked nutbread that the Lokilani provided us, we saddled Altaru and our other mounts.

And then there, in the apple grove where they were tethered, the whole Lokilani village turned out to bid us farewell.

'It's sad to say goodbye,' Pualani told us. She stood beneath a blossom-laden bough with Elan, Danali and Iolana, who was weeping. Around them stood hundreds of men, women and children, and around all the Lokilani – everywhere in the grove – flickered the forms of the Timpum. 'And yet maybe some day you'll return to us as we all hope you will.'

From the pocket of her skirt, she removed a green jewel about the size of a child's finger. She pressed it into Master Juwain's gnarly old hand and said, 'You're a Master Healer of your Brotherhood. And emeralds are the stones of healing; they have power over all the growing things of the earth. If you should take wounds or illness, from the Earthkillers or any others, please use this emerald to heal yourselves.'

Master Juwain looked down at the gleaming emerald as if mystified Then Pualani touched him lightly on his chest and said, 'There's no book that tells of this. To use it, you must open your heart. It has no resonance with the head.'

Master Juwain's bald head gleamed like a huge nut as he bowed and thanked her for her gift. Then she kissed him goodbye, and all the Lokilani, one by one, filed past us to touch our hands and kiss us as well.

'Farewell,' Pualani told us. 'May the light of the Ellama shine always upon you.'

Danali, with twenty or so of the Lokilani, had prepared an escort for us. As before, they each carried bows and arrows, but this time no one spoke of binding our hands. Because I thought it would be unseemly to mount our horses and sit so high above them when we already towered over them merely as we stood, we agreed to walk our horses through the Forest. Danali and the Lokilani led off while I followed holding Altaru's reins in my hand. Master Juwain and Maram came next, trailing both their sorrels and the pack horses. Atara walked next to Tanar in the rear.

It was a lovely morning, and the canopies of the astors shone above us like a dome of gold. The air smelled of fruits and flowers and the leaf-covered earth. Many birds were singing; their music seemed to pipe out in perfect time with the tinkling of the little stream that Danali followed. I thought that he was leading us west, but in the Forest I found my sense of direction dulled as if I had drunk too much wine.

We walked as quietly as we could in the silence of the great trees. No one spoke, not even to make little conversation or remark the beauty of some butterflies fluttering around a blackberry bush with their many-colored wings. An air of sadness hung over the woods, and we breathed its bittersweet fragrance with every step we took away from its center. The Timpum, so brilliant in their swirls of silver and scarlet, seemed less bright as we passed from the stands of astors into the giant oaks. There were fewer of them, too. We all knew that the Timpum could not live – if that was the right word – outside of the Forest. But to see them diminishing in splendor and numbers was a sorrowful thing.

Around noon, Danali left the stream and led us by secret paths through more thickly growing woods. Here the predominance of the oaks gave way to elms, maples and chestnuts, which, though still very tall, seemed stunted next to the giants of the deeper Forest. We walked along the winding paths for quite a few miles. The sun, crossing the sky somewhere above us, was invisible through the thick, green shrouds of leaves. I couldn't tell west from east or north from south.

After some hours, Danali finally broke his silence. He gave us to understand that the Forest could be almost as difficult to leave as it was to enter. Unless the Lokilani pointed themselves along certain, fixed paths out of it, they would find themselves wandering among the shimmering trees and being drawn back always toward its center.

'But it has been many years since any us has left the Forest,' he said. 'And many more since anyone, having. left, found his way back in.'

Another couple of miles brought us to a place beyond which Danali and his people wouldn't go. Here, in a stand of oaks sprinkled with a few birch trees, we felt a barrier hanging over the Forest like an invisible curtain. There were only a few Timpum about, lingering among the oaks and shining weakly. It was hard to look beyond them into the dense green swaths of woods. For, only a few hundred yards from us, we could see nothing – only leaves and bark and ferns and other such things.

'We'll say goodbye here,' Danali said. He pointed down the narrow path cutting through the trees. 'Follow this, and do not look back. It will take you into your forest.'

The Lokilani embraced each of us in turn. After Danali had pressed his slender form against Maram's belly, he smiled at him and said, 'Take care, Hairface. I'm glad, so very glad, that we didn't have to kill you.'

And with that, the Lokilani stepped off into the trees to allow us to pass. I continued walking Altaru down the path, with Maram and the others following me. I listened as my horse's hooves struck deep into the soft loam of the forest floor. It was good to move without the pain in my side that had bothered me all the way from Ishka; but it was bad to have to leave friends behind, and as we made our way down the winding path, we tried not to look back at them.

After only a few hundred yards, the air lying over the woods grew heavier and moister. The leaves of the trees suddenly lost their luster as if some clouds had darkened the sky above them. Everything looked duller. The colors seemed to have drained from the woods and flattened out into various shades of gray. Even the birds had stopped singing.

The path ended suddenly about half a mile farther on. Despite Danali's warning, we turned to look back along it. We knew well enough that it should lead back into the Forest. But the scraggy scratch in the earth, crowded with bushes and vine-twisted trees, seemed to lead nowhere. In gazing through the thick greenery behind us, I felt repelled by a strong sensation pushing at my chest. It was as if I should proceed in any other direction but that one. And so I did. I walked Altaru through the woods toward what I thought to be the northwest After a few hundred yards, the path vanished behind the walls of trees. A mile farther on, where the trees opened up a little and some dead elms lay down like slain giants, I would have been hard pressed to say exactly where the unseen Forest lay.

'We're lost, aren't we?' Maram said when we had' paused to take our bearings. He turned this way and that toward the dark woods surrounding us, and the look on his face was that of a frightened beast 'Oh, why did we ever leave the Forest? No more sweet wine for Maram. Not an astor to be seen here. Nor any-Timpum.'

But this last proved to be not quite true. Even as Maram stood pulling nervously at his beard, a little light flashed in the air above us. It seemed to appear out of nowhere. Suddenly, framed against the leaves of some arrowwood, the little Timpum that had attached itself to me floated in the air and spun about in its swirls of silver sparks. We all saw it as clearly as we could the leaves on the trees.

'Look!' Maram said to me. 'How did it come here?'

Atara took a step closer to if., all the while fixing the little lights with her wide blue eyes, 'Oh, look at it!' she said. 'Look how it flickers!'

Maram, inspired by her words., took this opportunity to give a name to the Timpum.

'Well, then, little Flick,' he said to him, 'look around you and you won't, see any of your kind. Sad to say, you're all alone in these dreary woods.'

Master Juwain pointed toward Flick, as I now couldn't help thinking of him. He said,

'Pualani was quite clear on this matter, the Timpum can't live outside of the Forest.'

'Nevertheless,' I said, looking at Flick, 'here he is, and here he lives.'

'Yes – but for how long?'

Master Juwain's question alarmed me, and I suddenly let go Altaru's reins to step forward toward the shimmering Timpum.

'Go back!' I said, waving my hands at Flick as if to shoo him away. 'Go back to your starflowers and astor trees!'

But Flick just floated in front of my eyes spinning out sparks at me.

'Maybe he's lost, as we are,' Maram said. 'Maybe he followed you here and can't find his way back.'

He proposed that we should return to the Forest in order to rescue Flick and spend at least one more night drinking wine and singing songs with the Lokilani.

'No, we must go on,' Atara said to him. 'If we did return to the Forest, even if we found our way back in, there's no certainty that Flick would follow us. And if he did, there's no reason why he wouldn't just follow us out again.'

Her argument made sense to everyone, even to Maram. But it sad-dened me. For I was sure that as soon as we struck off into these lesser woods that covered the earth before us. Flick would either die or slowly fade away.

'Do you think he might come with us a little farther?' Maram asked. 'Do you he might follow us toward Tria?'

'We'll see,' I said as I planted my boot in Altaru's stirrup and pulled myself up onto his back.

'But where is Tria? Val – do you know?'

'Yes,' I said, pointing off northwest into the woods. 'It's that way.'

'Are you sure?'

'Yes,' I said. I smiled with relief because my sense of direction had returned to me.

'But what about the Stonefaces?' he asked me. 'What if they find us here and follow us, too?'

I closed my eyes as I listened to the sounds of the woods and felt for anyone watching us. But other than a badger and a few deer, the only I being that seemed aware of us was Flick.

'The Stonefaces must surely have lost us when we entered the Forest,' I told Maram.

'Now let's ride while we still have some day left.'

For a few hours more, we rode at a fast walk through the thick woods. No paths cut through the trees here, and in many places we had to force our way through dense undergrowth. But toward dusk, the trees opened again and the going was much easier. Our first concern was that we should keep to our course, bearing more north than west. And our second was this little array of lights that Maram had named Flick.

'Do you see?' he said when we had stopped by a stream to water the horses. He pointed at Flick, who hovered above the stream's bank like a bright bird watching for fish. 'He still follows us.'

'Yes,' I said. 'And he still shimmers, as before. This is hard to understand.'

'Well, we're still close to the Forest,' Master Juwain said. 'Perhaps he still takes his substance and strength from it.'

We decided to make camp there by the stream. It was our first night outside the Forest since our flight from the Stonefaces. As before, we took turns keeping watch.

But no one came through the blackened trees to attack us. Nor did any dark dreams come to disturb our sleep. Even so, it was a hard night and a lonely one. Without the Lokilani's evening songs and the company of the Timpum, the hours passed slowly.

During my watch, I listened to the crickets chirping and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees above us. I counted the beats of my heart even as I looked for Flick in the dying flames of the fire or above me in the darkness, twinkling like a lone constellation of stars. I didn't know whether to resent or rejoice in his presence. For he was a very poignant reminder of a brighter place, where the great trees connected the earth to the sky and I had felt fully and truly alive.

During our next day's journey, we all suffered the sadness of leaving the Forest. As Pualani had warned us, the woods here seemed almost dead. And that was strange, because they were nearly the same woods through which I had walked as a child in Mesh and had loved. The maples still showed their three-pointed leaves, and the same gray squirrels ran up and down them clicking their claws against the silver-gray bark. The horned owls who hunted them were familiar to me, as were the robins singing their rising and falling song: cheery-up, cheery-me. Perhaps everything – the birds and the badgers, the thistles and the flowers – were too familiar. Against my memory of the Forest's splendor, the trees here were ashen and stunted, and the animals all moved about in their same pointless patterns, dully and Listlessly, as if drained of blood.

As we rode through the long day, we, too, began moving with a measured heaviness.

It grew cloudy, and then rained for a while. The constant drumming of the large drops against our heads did little to lift our spirits. The whole world seemed wet and gray, and it smelled of the iron with which my armor had been made. The trees went on mile after mile, unbroken by any path and oppressive in their thick swaths of grayish-green that blocked out the sun.

Our camp that night was cheerless and cold. It rained so hard for a while that not even Maram could get a fire going. We all huddled beneath our cloaks, trying in our turns to sleep against our shivering. During my watch, I waited in vain for the sky to clear and the stars to come out. I looked for Flick, too. But in the dark, dripping woods, I couldn't find the faintest glint of light. By the time I fell off to sleep, I was sure that he was dead.

When dawn came, however, Atara espied him nestled down in my hair. It was the only brightness that any of us could find in that cool, gray morning. After a quick meal of some soggy nutbread and blackberries rimed with newly-grown mold, we set out into the rainy woods. The horses' hooves made rhythmic sucking sounds against the sodden forest floor. We listened for the more cheery piping of the bluebirds or even the whistles of the thrushes, but the trees were empty of any song.

The woods seemed endless, as if we might ride all that day and for ten thousand days all the way around the world and never see the end of them. We all knew in our heads that if our course were true, we must eventually cut the Nar Road. But our hearts told us that we were lost, moving in circles. We each began to worry that our food would run out or some disaster befall us long before we reached the road.

That afternoon the rain stopped, and the sun made a brief appearance. But it brought only a little thin light and no joy. As the day deepened toward dusk, even this glimmer began to weaken and fade. And so did our spirits weaken. Maram told us that he would have been better off letting Lord Harsha run him through with his sword, thus saving him from death by starvation in a trackless -wilderness. Master Juwain sat astride his swaying horse staring at his book as if he couldn't decide which passage to read. Atara, whose courage never flagged, sang songs to cheer herself and us. But in the gloom of the woods, the notes she struck sounded hollow and false. I sensed her anger at herself for failing to uplift us: it was cold, hard and black as an iron arrowpoint. Compassion for other beings she might have in abundance, but for herself she spared no pity.

My despair was possibly the deepest for having the least excuse: I knew that we were moving in the right direction but allowed myself to doubt whether we would ever see the Nar Road or Tria. In my openness to my friends' forebodings, I allowed their doubts to become my own.

What is despair, really? It is a dark night of the soul and the remembrance of brighter things. It is a silent calling out to them. But the call comes from the darkest of places and is often heard by dark things instead.

That night as we camped beneath an old elm tree, we had dreams of dreadful things.

Creatures of the dark came to devour us: we felt worms eating at our insides, bats biting us open and mosquitoes smothering us in thick black clouds and sucking out our blood. Gray shapes that looked like corpses torn from graves came to take our hands and pull us down into the ground. Even Master Juwain moaned in a tormented sleep, his meditations and allies having finally failed him. When morning came, all misty and gray, we spoke of our nightmares and discovered that they were very much the same.

'It's the Stonefaces, isn't it?' Maram said. 'They've found us again.'

'Yes,' I said, giving voice to what we all knew to be true. 'But have they found us in the flesh or only in our dreams?'

'You tell us, Val.'

I stood up from my bearskin and pulled my cloak around me. The woods in every direction seemed all the same. The oaks and elms were shagged with mosses, and a heavy mist lay over them – and over the dogwood and ferns and lesser vegetation as well. Everything smelled moist: of mushrooms and rotting wood. I had an unsettling sense that men were smelling me as from many miles away. I couldn't tell, however, how far they might be or whether they stalked the woods to the east or west north or south. I knew only that they were hunting me and that their shapes were as gray as stone.

'We can't be far from the Nar Road,' I said. 'If we ride hard for it, we should reach it by dusk.'

'You're guessing, my friend, aren't you?'

In truth, I was guessing, but I thought it to be a good one. I was almost certain that the road couldn't lie much more than a day's journey to the north, or possibly two.

'What if the Stonefaces are waiting for us on the road?' Maram asked.

'No – they left the road to follow us through the forest Probably they're as lost as you seem to think that we are.'

'Probably? Would you bet our lives on probably?'

'We can't wander these woods forever,' I said. 'Sooner or later, we'll have to return to the road.'

'We could return to the Forest, couldn't we?'

'Yes,' I said, 'if we could find it again. But likely the Stonefaces would find us first.'

Over the embers of the fire that had burned through the night, we held council as to what we should do. Atara said that all paths before us were perilous; since we couldn't see the safest, we should choose the one that led directly to Tria, which meant making straight for the Nar Road.

'In any case,' she said, 'none of us set out on this journey with the end of dying peacefully in our sleep. We should decide whether it's the Lightstone or safety that we seek.'

She pointed out that we must be nearing the civilized parts of Alonia; if we did reach the road, she said, likely we would find it patrolled by King Kiritan's men.

'We must have come as far west as Suma,' she said. 'The Stonefaces, whoever they are, would have to be very daring to ride openly against us there. It's said that King Kiritan hangs brigands and outlaws.'

Maram grumbled that, for a warrior of the Kurmak, she seemed to know a lot about Alonia. He doubted that King Kiritan kept his roads as safe as she said. But in the end, he agreed that we should strike for the road, and so he set to breaking camp with a resigned weariness.

We were all tired that morning as we rode through the woods. As well, we all had headaches, which grew worse with the constant pounding of the horses' hooves.

Twice, I changed our course, to the east and due west through some elderberry thickets, to see if that might blunt the attack against us. But both times, my sense of someone hunting us did not diminish, and neither did our suffering. It was as if the sky, heavily laden with clouds, was slowly pressing at us and crushing our skulls against the earth.

By noon, however, the clouds burned away, and the sun came out. We all hoped to take a little cheer from its unexpected radiance. But the blazing orb drove arrows of fire into the forest, and it grew stifling hot The sultry air choked us; gray vapors steamed up from the sodden earth. In the flatness of the land here, we could find no brook or stream, and so we had to content ourselves with the warm water in our canteens to slake our raging thirsts.

As we made our way north, the woods in many places broke upon abandoned fields on which grew highbush blackberry, sumac and other shrubs. Twice we found the remains of houses rotting among the meadow flowers. I took this as a sign that we were indeed approaching the civilized parts of Alonia that Atara had told of. We all hoped to find the Nar Road just a little farther on, after perhaps only a few more miles. And so we rode hard all that afternoon through forest and fields burning in the hot Soldru sun.

We came upon the road without warning just before dusk. As we were riding through a copse of mulberry, the trees suddenly gave out onto a broad band of stone. The road, as I could see, ran very straight here east and west through the flat fewest. From the emptiness of this country, I guessed that Suma must lie to our east which meant that we had bypassed this great city by quite a few miles. After some miles more – perhaps as few as eighty – we would find Tria down the road to the west.

'We're saved, then!' Maram cried out. He climbed down from his horse, and collapsed to his knees as he kissed the road's stones in relief. 'Shall we ride on until we find a village or town?' I dismounted Altaru and stood beside him along the curb of the road. The day was dying quickly, and for the first night in many nights, we had a clear view of the sky. Already Valura, the evening star, shone in the blue-black dome to the west. In the east, the moon was rising: a full moon, as we could all see from its almost perfect circle of silver. The last time 1 had stood beneath a moon so bright had been in the Black Bog. I couldn't look upon it now without recalling that time of terror when 1 had feared that I was losing my mind.

Even as I now feared that men were attacking my mind. With the coming of night, the pain in all our heads grew suddenly worse. It seemed that the Stonefaces, whatever they were, took their greatest strength and boldness from the dark.

'If we ride,' I said, 'It would be very bad if the Stonefaces were waiting on the road to ambush us.'

I looked at Master Juwain slumped on his horse and at Atara forcing a smile to her worn-out face. We were all exhausted, I thought, and growing weaker by the hour. I doubted whether we could ride half the night to the next village.

'Wouldn't it be worse if they ambushed us here?' Maram asked. 'No,' I said, pointing behind us. 'We passed a meadow less than half a mile back. We could make camp there and fortify it against attack.' 'All right,' Maram said wearily. 'I'm too tired to argue.' We mounted our horses again, and made our way back to the meadow. It was a broad, grassy expanse perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. Copses of mulberry and oak surrounded it. We hauled some deadfall from these woods to the center of the meadow where we built up around our camp a sort of circular fence. It took many trips back and forth to gather enough wood to construct such rudimentary fortifications. But when we were finished, we felt very glad to go inside it and lay out our bearskins.

It was full night by the time we finished our dinner. The moon had climbed above the meadow and silvered it with its cold light. Long, grayish grasses swayed in the gentle wind blowing in from the east. In the eerie sheen of the earth, the many rocks about us seemed as big as boulders. We had a clear line of sight fifty yards in any direction toward the rim of dark trees that surrounded us. Unless it grew very cloudy, no one could steal upon us unseen. And if anyone attacked us openly, we would kill them with arrows. Toward this end, Maram unpacked my arrows and bow and kept them close at hand. We checked our swords as well. Atara stood up against the breastwork of the fence as she practiced drawing her great, horn bow and aiming arrows over the top of it. She seemed satisfied that we had done all we could. After bidding us goodnight, she slipped down to the ground to sleep holding her bow as child might a blanket.

I took the first watch while the others slept fitfully. I knew they must be having evil dreams: Maram sweated and rolled about, while Master Juwain's small body twitched and started whenever he let out a low moan. Several times Atara murmured,

'No, no, no,' before falling into the ragged rhythms of her breathing.

When it came my turn to sleep, I couldn't bear the thought of closing my eyes. It was selfish of me, but I couldn't bring myself to wake up Master Juwain, either. And so I walked in a slow circle behind the fence looking out across the meadow. The horses, tethered outside the fence, were silently sleeping. So still did they stand that they looked like statues. As did the trees of the surrounding woods. In their dark shadows, I could see nothing. I listened for any telltale that men might be coming to attack us, but the only sounds were the crickets in the meadow and the distant howling of some wolves. Wherever these great, gray beasts stood, I thought, they must be looking upon the same moon as did I. I watched this pale disk climb the starry heavens inch by inch. I might have measured out the moments of its rise and fall by the painful beating of my heart., but the night seemed to deepen into a timelessness that had no end.

I let Maram sleep as well in place of standing his watch. And Atara, too. Despite the pain in my head, which drove through my eyes like nails, I was wide awake. The night was very warm, and I sweated beneath my armor. My legs shook with the effort of remaining standing. Even so, for many hours, I stared out across the meadow, listening and waiting I walked around and around our camp trying to catch the sense of whoever might be hunting us.

Near dawn, without warning, Atara started out of her sleep and rose to stand by my side. When she saw the angle of the moon, she chided me for staying awake nearly all night. Then she sniffed the wind as might a tawny lioness and said, 'They're close, aren't they?' 'Yes,' I said, 'they are.'

'Then you should gotten some sleep to face them.'

'Sleep,' I said, shaking my head.

For a while we spoke of little things such as the direction of the wind and the grimness of the gray face of the moon. And then I looked at her and asked, 'Are you afraid to die?'

She thought about this for a long moment before saying, 'Death is like going to sleep. Should I be afraid of sleeping, then?'

I looked at Master Juwain as he lay against the ground moaning softly. I almost told Atara that death is cold, death is dark, death is an evil dream full of empty black nothing. But I kept myself from voicing such despair.

Even so, she seemed to sense my doubts. She smiled at me bravely and said, 'We take our being from the One. How can the One ever stop being? How can we?'

Because I had no answer for her, I looked up at the black spaces between the stars.

I felt her hand touch my face, and I turned to look at her as she asked me, 'Are you afraid?'

'Yes,' I told her. 'But most afraid for you.'

She smiled at me in the silent understanding that had flowed between us almost from our first moment together. Then her face fell serious as she said a strange thing: 'I can see them, you know.' 'See who, Atara?'

'The men,' she said. 'The gray men.'

'You mean, you saw them in your dreams?'

'Yes, that of course. But I can see them here, now.'

I looked at the gray trees standing in a circle all about us with their leafy arms raised toward the sky, but I saw no men standing with them.

Then Atara pointed out across the moonlit meadow and said, 'I can see them walking toward us with their knives.'

If the Stonefaces came to attack us, I thought, then surely they would stand behind the trees shooting arrows at us or charge us on horses with their swords drawn.

'Once, when I was a child,' she said, 'I saw a spider weaving a web in a corner of my father's house a month before she actually did. I can see the gray men the same way.'

I continued looking out around the meadow; other than the wind-rippled grasses, nothing moved. The moon seemed like a silver nail pinning still the sky. In between the soughs of Atara's breaths, I could almost feel each beat of her heart as it hung in the air like a boom of a great red drum.

And then Altaru came violently awake and let out a tremendous whinny, and I saw them, too. They suddenly appeared next to the trees as if the dark shadows had given them birth. Tall men they were, with hooded, grayish cloaks covering them from head to knee. As Atara had said, there were at least nine of them. Although we couldn't see their faces, they stood around the circle of trees watching us and waiting for something.

I quickly drew my sword.

Again, Altaru whinnied and stomped the earth as he pulled and rattled the fence. His noise shook Master Juwain and Maram awake.

'What is it?' Maram grumbled as he struggled to his feet rubbing his eyes. Then he looked across the meadow and cried out, 'Oh, no! Oh, my Lord – it's them!'

When pressed, Maram could move very quickly, big belly or no. It took only a moment for him to grab up his bow and join Atara and me by the fence.

'Don't shoot them!' Master Juwain pleaded as he stepped forward, too. By now, both Maram and Atara had arrows nocked to their bowstring as they began to pull and sight on the gray men. 'We should try to talk to them first.'

Yes, we should, I thought. And so I called out, 'Who are you? What do you want of us?'

But their only answer was a silence that came with the sudden dying of the wind..

'Go away!' Maram called to them. 'Go away or we'll shoot you!'

But still the gray men didn't move, and the silence in the meadow grew only deeper.

'I'm going to give them a warning,' Maram said, squeezing his arrow between his fingers. 'I'm going to shoot this into a tree.'

Without waiting for me to say yea or nay, he quickly drew his bow. But his hands and arms suddenly started trembling; the arrow, when it came whining off his string, buried itself in the ground only forty feet from the fence.

'Hmmph – shooting at moles again,' Atara said. Then she too fired off a shot. But at the moment she released her arrow, her bow arm buckled as if broken at the elbow. Her arrow drove into the ground after covering even less distance than had Maram's.

Something moved then in the shadows of the trees. Twigs cracked and even from fifty yards away, we could hear the rustling of leaves. A very tall man stepped forward into the moonlight He was dressed as the others in gray trousers and a hooded cloak that covered his face He had an air of command about him. When he turned his unseen face toward us and stood as if scenting us or staring intently into our souls, the others did too.

'Go away!' Maram cried again. 'Go away now, please!'

The gray men seemed not to hear him. Following their leader, they all drew forth long, gray knives and began walking across the meadow toward us, even as Atara had foreseen.

Atara and Maram fired more arrows at them, but they flew wild. The men advanced slowly as if taking care not to stumble over any branch or rock. Their gray-steel knives glinted dully in the moon's eerie light. When they had covered perhaps half the distance toward our camp, I caught a glimpse of their leader staring at me from beneath his cloak's gray hood. His face was long and flat, without expression and as gray as slate. There seemed to be something stuck to the middle of his forehead, where it was said one's third eye lies: it looked like a leech or some kind of flat, black stone.

'Go away,' I whispered. 'Go away, or one of us will have to die.'

Just then a swirl of little lights appeared as of stars dropping down from the heavens.

It was Flick, spinning about furiously as he streaked back and forth in front of the gray men. It seemed that he was trying to warn them away or perhaps weaving a fence of light through which they couldn't pass. But the men took no notice of his presence. They walked slowly forward as if nothing stood between them and us.

In their disbelief at missing such easy marks, the urge to flee overcame Maram and Atara all at once. They began backing away from the gray men, all the while shooting arrows at the men as I joined them in edging up near the rear of the fence. Master Juwain pressed up close to us. and then the gray men's leader stood very still. The black stone on his forehead caught the moonlight, and gleamed darkly. At that moment a crushing heaviness fell across my whole body. I dropped my sword and my friends let go of their bows. My arms and legs were so weak that it seemed something had drained the blood from them. I wanted desperately to run, to will myself to move, but I could not. A terrible coldness spread quickly through me and froze me motionless like a fish caught in ice. I couldn't even open my mouth to scream.

And neither could my friends. But I sensed them screaming inside for the gray men to go away and I knew that they could hear the screams of the horses, even as I could. The gray men's leader dispatched two of his confederates toward them. All of the -horseswere now whinnying and rearing and kicking the ground. Altaru aimed a mighty kick at the fence. It splintered the wood and he pulled free from it, along with the two sorrels and Tanar, who immediately ran off into the woods. Altaru charged straight for the two men closest to the fence. But then they showed him their knives and something worse, and he suddenly changed course, galloping off into the woods, too. Although he was the bravest of beings, something about the gray men sent him into a panic.

The two men now closed on the remaining horses. They seemed bothered by their screaming and the beating of their hooves; it was as if the gray men sought silence in the outer world so that they could hear the voices of the inner. And so, moving with great care, they used their long knives to slash open the horses' throats.

No, I cried out in my voice of my mind, no, no, no!

The other gray men began pulling at the branches and logs of the fence, dismantling it and making an opening wide enough for all of them to pass. And still I stood with the others at the rear of the fence,. watching them but unable to move.

And then the gray men's leader stepped forward and threw bark his hood. The black stone on his forehead was a dark moon crushing us to the earth. The flesh of his face was gray as that of a dead fish. As Atara had told us, he had no eyes like any man I had ever seen. They were all of one hue and substance: a solid and translucent gray that covered them like dark glass. I couldn't guess how they let in any light; they let forth no light either, no hint of humanity or soul. They seemed utterly without pity, utterly empty, utterly cold. This cold struck straight into my heart like a lance of ice. It filled me with a wild fear. A steely voice spoke inside me then and told me that I couldn't move. I was nothing, it said to me; I was nothing more than an empty husk of flesh to be used as the gray men wished. I was one with the dead, and would take a long, long time in dying.

Evil, I knew then, was much more than darkness: it was a willful turning away from the light of the One. It was a poison that twists the soul, a madness, a terrible need to inflate one's self at the expense of others, as a tick swells on its victims' blood.

No-go back!

All the gray men now gathered around their leader at the opening to the fence Their knives pointed toward us. Then they too threw back their hoods. Although they wore no stones on their foreheads, their faces were as eyeless and stonelike as their leader's. They stood in the cold moonlight watching us and waiting.

Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!

I felt Atara's terror, and Master Juwain's and Maram's, thundering at me with the wild beating of their hearts. I couldn't close it out. Neither could I close my eyes as the gray men pierced me with theirs and began drinking from inside me that which was more precious than blood.

NO! NO! NO!

I wanted with all my soul to close my eyes and end this living nightmare from which I could not awaken. But then, even as I tried desperately to move my legs and run away, I looked across the meadow to see another cloaked figure break from the trees. This lone man, slightly shorter than the others, ran as silently as a wraith through the silvery grass. He had a sword drawn: it was longer than a knife, and longer than many swords, for it was a kalama. His powerful strides revealed the gleaming mail beneath his cloak. It took him only a few seconds to reach the wolf pack of men by the open fence. He crashed into them, sending two flying and slicing through the neck of a third. And then, even as the gray men finally realized they were under attack and turned toward him, he stabbed his sword straight through the back of their leader.

'Move!' he cried to us in voice like the roar of a tiger. 'Move now, I say!'

And then he drove into the men with his sword, whirling about powerfully yet gracefully, cutting at them with a rare and terrible fury.

With the death of the gray men's leader, I found myself suddenly free to move. A great surge of life welled up inside me and filled my hands with a new strength. Some of the gray men were running from the wild man at the opening of the fence; some were running at Atara and me. One of these aimed his knife at Atara's throat; without thinking, I picked up my sword and chopped off his arm in almost a single motion.

Grayish-black blood sprayed into the air. It surprised me that he wore no armor and that the steel of my sword sliced through him so easily. The kalama is a fearsome weapon at any time, but most terrible to use against unprotected flesh. As I was forced to use it now. For in the rush of men coming at us with their gray, slashing knives, even as Maram and Atara drew their swords and laid about them in a wild death struggle, one of the men stole up behind her to stab her in the back. His back was to me, his knife poised to thrust home, and I was faced with a terrible choice: I could cut him down or let him kill her. It was no choice at all. And so, still reeling from the wound I had inflicted on the first man, I swung my sword at him. It sliced into his side and through his chest; I felt its cold steel rip through his heart. Dark blood sprayed into my eyes; I could hardly see as he jumped in agony and turned to regard me for a moment in the strange silence of his hate. And then he died, and 1 almost died, too. I fell down to the blood-soaked earth screaming like a child as the darkness closed in and the battle raged all about me.

Later, when the last of the gray men had been killed and Maram and Atara stood panting with their bloody swords in their hands, the man who had run to our rescue let loose a howl of triumph. He stood in the moonlight holding his sword up to the stars. I felt his great joy at having slain so many of his enemies. Even through the death-agony covering my eyes like a dark, gray shroud, I watched him turn toward me. He threw back the hood of his cloak. His face blazed with a terrible beauty, his eyes all black and bright, and I gasped to see that it was Kane.