The Lightstone

Chapter 24

That night I had my first dream of Morjin in nearly a month. He appeared to me with his unearthly beauty and golden, dragon's eyes; he told me that he had found me again and would never leave my side. A price, he said, must be paid for the slaying of his son. He would send other fell beings to hunt us down, and if they failed to take, us, he would come for us himself.

I awoke drenched in sweat and beleaguered by a cloud of mosquitoes. Leeches still hung swaying from the surrounding trees. With Meliadus' death, the worst of the Vardaloon had perished, but we still remained in the thick of that horrible wood. And so, in the quiet of the cool, damp morning, we saddled our horses and determined to ride out of it as fast as we could.

We traveled ail that day north and west toward the unseen ocean. We kept hoping to catch a glint of water through the wall of green before us. But the hills rose and fell like steps leading nowhere, and the forest covering them allowed only a rare few glimpses of the sky. Dusk found us fighting through some clumps of winged blackthorn and stands of yellow poplar. And so we were forced to spend yet another night in the company of our bloodsucking friends. That there seemed fewer of them in this part of the woods, I almost didn't notice. I lay awake most of the night, listening for worse things than mosquitoes.

In truth, I mourned the loss of my sword. Without it I felt naked and alone. How was I to defend my friends if a real bear should attack us or some servant of Morjin's surprise us in a fury of pounding hooves and well-tempered steel? My kalama was irreplaceable, I knew, for only the smiths of faraway Godhra made such wondrous swords. And even if I were willing to slide a lesser blade into my sheath, where would I find even a broadsword or longsword in the wild lands so many miles from any kingdom or civilized place?

'I'll give you my sword, if you wish,' Kane said to me the next morning as were preparing for yet another day of our journey. 'It's a kalama, too.'

'Thank you, but no,' I said to him. His concern astonished me. 'Your sword is your soul, and you can't just give it to anyone.'

'But you're not anyone, eh?'

I climbed on top of Altaru and touched the upraised lance holstered at his side. 'A knight has other weapons, yes?'

'Perhaps,' he said.

I looked down at the long blade buckled to his waist and said, 'Besides, we'll all ride more easily knowing that Ea's greatest swordsman still has his.'

Eight miles of hard travel that morning brought us to the crest of a line of hills. And there the Vardaloon suddenly ended. We felt this mostly as a cooling of the earth and a change in the air, for there were still many trees about us. But these were mostly white oak, magnolia and sycamore, and no leeches infested them. Neither did the wind stir with mosquitoes. Liljana, who had the keenest nose of us all, said that she could smell the faint, far-off scent of the sea. This good news caused us to make our way forward with renewed spirit. We were so excited that we didn't stop for lunch, and ate a cold meal of cheese and battle biscuits in our saddles.

Soon the hills began to grow smaller, and we came to a more open country. The woods were broken with fields and flats of hawthorn, elderleaf and highbush blueberry. And then, after another six or seven miles, we topped the last of the hills.

And there, below us, windswept dunes were piled up east and west as far as the eye could see. Beyond them shone the blue waters of the Great Northern Ocean.

'Oh, my Lord – we did it!' Maram said as we rode down to the dunes. When we reached these castle-like mounds of sand, he practically fell from his horse and kissed the ground. 'We're saved!'

After whooping like a wild dog and throwing up handtuls of sand, he remounted, and we rode across the dunes toward the sea. Although we were all eager to stand before this great water, we had to make our way carefully along the dunes' shirting slopes. Master Juwain, who had been raised on the islands of the Elyssu, pointed out the various strange plants growing there and told me their names: the beach rose and the rounded shrubs of the beach plum; the matlike dusty miller, with its tiny yellow flowers and the blue-eyed grasses rippling in the wind.

After we had ridden down the last of the dunes, we came out upon a wide, sandy beach. There was much seaweed and many shells along the high-tide line. The air smelled of salt and carried the sound of the crashing surf. The sun was a great, golden chariot rolling down the clear blue sky toward the west. Because of the lateness of the hour we decided to go no further that day. Of course, with the ocean only a hundred yards away, there was really nowhere else to go.

'Unless,' as Master Juwain observed, pointing out toward the sea, 'this isn't the Bay of Whales after all.'

'It must be,' Maram said, coming down off his horse.

Kane stood on the sand with his hand above his eves, shielding them from the water's fierce glare. He seemed lost in memories as deep as the sea.

'What do you think?' I asked, coming up next to him.

Kane's hard hand swept out to the right and then the left. 'The coast here runs east and west. So it would be with the most inland part of the Bay of Whales.'

'And so it would be with the coast on either side of the Bay of Whales,' Master Juwain put in. He had studied his maps as well as any man, and was prepared to give us a geography lesson. 'If we came too far to the north, then the Bay of Whales will still lie to the west of us.'

'We didn't come too far north,' I assured him.

'And if we came too far west,' he said, looking at me, 'we will have overshot the Bay altogether. In that case, it would lie to the east.'

Kane's thick white hair rippled in the wind as he said. 'The Bay can't be more than sixty miles at its widest eh? If this is the Bay and we ride west, the beach should begin curving toward the north soon enough.'

'But if it isn't' Master Juwain said, 'we'll ride many miles to no good end. And then have to turn back.'

We stood there for several minutes debating what course to set the next day. Then Liljana came forward and laughed at us as if we were squabbling children.

'Of course this is the Bay,' she told us.

'But how do you know?' Maram asked, looking at her in surprise. 'Because,' she said, her nostrils quivering as she gazed out at the sea, 'I can smell the whales.'

We all smiled at this wild claim. But after remembering how she had saved me from Baron Narcavage's poisoned wine, I wasn't so sure.

'Why don't we make camp and decide tomorrow which way to turn,' I said. 'We'll think better if we're not so tired.'

Maram, I saw, was still exhausted from what Meliadus had done to him, and all of our faces were haggard and cut from our passage through the Vardaloon. I had seen warriors, after months of siege and starvation, who had looked better than we did.

And so we spread out out furs on the soft sand and Maram gather driftwood for a fire. Kane, foraging farther down the beach for logs or bushes with which to fortify our camp, came upon many blue crabs trapped in a tide pool between two belts of sand. He gathered up a hundred of these strange-looking beasts in his cloak and brought them back for Liljana to cook. Master Juwain dug up some clams from the hardpack near the ocean, and these he presented to Liljana as well. She added them to the stew that she was already cooking in her pot. Many of the crabs, however, she saved to be roasted on spits over the fire. It seemed to take hours for her to prepare this unusual meal. But when; she had finished, all our mouths were watering. We sat around the fire cracking the crabs with stones and devouring the succulent meat. We mopped up the stew with some bread that Liljana made, and washed it all down with mugfuls of brown beer. In all my life, I had never had a finer feast.

The next morning, I awoke early to the harsh cries of seagulls fighting over the shells of the crabs. We spent a few hours in the shallows washing the blood from our clothing and bathing our wounded bodies. Master Juwain said that sea salt was good for mosquito bites and other hurts of the skin. The water was cold and rimed pur clothing, but we all welcomed its healing touch.

After that, we gathered on the beach and looked out across the ocean for the Sea People. All we saw, however, were sparkling waters broken only by waves. Master Juwain brought out his variste and pointed it at the rolling blue swells in the hope of sensing any kind of life. But all he found in the water were more crabs. Atara looked into her crystal sphere for a long time, but if she saw anything there resembling these mighty swimmers, she didn't say. Alphanderry took up his mandolet and sang to the sea in the sweetest of voices, but no one sang back.

'Ah, perhaps this isn't the Bay of Whales after all,' Maram said. 'Or perhaps the Sea People don't come here anymore.'

His words were as heavy as the sea itself. We stood staring out at the gleaming horizon as we thought about them. No one seemed to know what to do.

And then a strange look fell over Liljana's face. With great excitement, she began stripping off her still-moist tunic. When she had uncovered herself, she began walking quickly down toward the water. Modesty demanded that I look away from her, but I was afraid that her usual good sense had left her, for I felt in her an urge to swim far out into the surf. So I watched her dive into the breaking waves. She was a stocky woman, big-breasted with wide hips, and still quite strong for her years. She swam straight out to sea with measured strokes, and I marveled at her skill and power.

'Liljana, what are you doing?' Maram called to her. But the booming surf swept away his voice, and she seemed not to hear him. And so he turned to me and asked, 'Val – what is she doing?'

But I couldn't tell him. I could only watch as she swam farther out to sea.

'Ah, shouldn't you do something?' Maram asked me.

'What, then?'

'Swim after her!' I watched Liljana pulling and kicking at the water, and I slowy shook my head. In truth, I was a poor swimmer. It took all my courage even to jump into a mountain lake.

'But she'll drown!' Maram said.

Atara came up and smiled at him. 'Drown, hmmph! She seems as likely to drown as a fish.'

'But the ocean is dangerous,' Maram said 'Even for strong swim mers.'

'Then perhaps you should go after her.'

'I? I? Are you mad? I can't swim!'

'Neither can I,' Atara admitted.

And neither could any of us, I thought, swim as Liljana did. We all watched from the beach as she made her way far out past the line of the white-crested breakers.

And then Maram's puffy, mosquito-bitten face went as white as if another monster had drained him of blood. He pointed toward Liljana as two grayish fins suddenly cut the water near her, and he cried out, 'Sharks! Sharks! Oh, my Lord, she'll be eaten by sharks!'

In only a few more moments, as I drew in a deep breath and felt the hearts of my companions beating as quickly as mine, another ten or twelve fins appeared in a circle around liljana. They were closing on her quickly, like a noose around a neck.

And then, without warning, a bluish shape leaped straight out of the water only a few yards from Liljana and fell back in with a terrific splash. Two more broached the surface and blew out their breaths in steamy blasts while others raised their heads out of the water and began talking in a high-pitched, squeaking language stranger even than the songs that Alphanderry sang for us. They had long, pointed snouts that seemed cast in perpetual smiles, and Master Juwain called them dolphins. He said that once they had been the most numerous, if the least powerful, of the Sea People, For a long time, the dolphins swam near Liljana. They jumped out of the water, doing flips seemingly just for the fun of it. They nudged her with their noses and buoyed her up with their sleek, beautiful bodies. And all the while, they never stopped whistling and clicking and speaking to her. But what words of wisdom they imparted to her, none of us could tell.

After perhaps half an hour of such frolic, Liljana turned back toward the land. Two dolphins, one on either side of her, swam with her as far as the line of the breakers.

They appeared to watch as she caught herself up in a gathering wave and let it carry her a good way toward the beach. As Liljana stood up suddenly in the shallows and streams of water dripped from her olive skin and dark brown hair, the dolphins gathered offshore as if holding a council of their own.

'How did you know the Sea People were here?' Maram asked Liljana after she dressed herself and rejoined us. 'Did you really smell them?'

'Yes, doubtful Prince,' she said, 'in a way, I did.'

She cast a quick look at the squeaking dolphins, and so did we.

'Did they speak to you?' I asked her.

'Yes, they did,' she said. Her hazel eyes fell sad and dreamy. Then she continued,

'But I'm afraid I didn't understand them.'

'So it's been for thousands of years,' Kane said. 'No one can speak to the Sea People anymore.'

Liljana looked out to where Flick spun like a silver wheel over the water in the direction of the dolphins. Then she said, 'They want to speak with us. I know they do.'

'Ha – why should the Sea People speak with us?' Kane asked. 'It's said that ever since the Age of Swords, men have hunted them like fishes.'

'We have much to tell each other,' Liljana said wistfully. 'I know we do.'

We stood on the beach for quite a while staring out at the immense barrier of water that separated us from the whales. Then Alphanderry suddenly stuck out his arm and said, 'Look, they're swimming away!'

Indeed, the whole dolphin tribe was now swimming slowly parallel to the shore toward the west. Liljana slowly nodded her head, watching them. And then she said,

'They want us to follow them.'

'But how do you know?' I asked her.

'I just know,' she told me.

'But where are they leading us, then?'

'Wherever they will,' she said, looking at me sternly. My doubt seemed to wound her, and she said, 'Have I asked you, young Prince, where you've been leading us all these long days?'

'But it's been clear that we've been heading toward the Bay of Whales.'

'And now we're here,' she said. She kept her voice calm and controlled, but I could feel a great excitement inside her. 'Will you help me discover what these people want from us?'

Her soft, searching eyes called to mind all the kindnesses she had done for me on our journey and suggested that I would be churlish to refuse her. Without waiting for me to answer, she began walking quickly down the beach, all the while keeping her gaze fixed upon the dolphins. It was left to me to gather up the others and break camp as quickly as we could.

We caught up with her about three miles down the beach. While Maram and Master Juwain took charge of the pack horses and Liljana's gelding, Alphanderry and traced our horses with Kane's and Atara's along the water's edge. After the clutching vegetation of the Vardaloon, it was good to move over open country again. Altaru snorted and shook with a joyous power as I gave him his head. His hooves pounded against the wet, hardpacked sand leaving great holes in it. But although he was the strongest of the horses and faster than even Atara's very fast Fire, he could not quite keep up with Alphanderry as he sang to Iolo and urged his white Tervolan forward.

What the dolphins made of us as we galloped clear past Liljana before wheeling about was impossible to say. For they just kept swimming a few hundred yards offshore as if they had all the time in the world to lead us toward some secret place.

'Perhaps they know where the Lightstone is,' Maram said as he and Master Juwain also caught up with Liljana. He handed Liljana the reins of her horse. 'Perhaps Sartan Odinan fled north from Argattha with the Gelstei and was stopped here by the ocean. Perhaps he died on this forsaken shore, and all knowledge of the Lightstone with him.'

What Maram had suggested seemed unlikely – but no more so than any other speculation as to the Lightstone's fate. We grew silent after that, each of us holding inside the image of this sacred golden cup. Our hopes fairly floated in the air like the puffy white clouds above the Bay. We were all a little excited, and we rode our horses at a bone-jarring trot as we tried to keep pace with the dolphins.

For hours, as the sun crossed the sky to the south, we made our way along the beach. The dunes gradually gave way to a headland of water-eaten limestone while the beach narrowed to a ribbon of rocky sand scarcely twenty yards wide. The horses hurt their hooves on this rough shingle. If we pressed them much harder, I thought, they would pull up lame. As it was, they were still weak from what the Vardaloon had taken from them and could not continue this way for long.

And then, just as I feared the beach would vanish to nothing between the headland to our left and the crashing surf, we came upon a cove cut into the stark, white cliffs.

Great rocks broke from the shallows and the sand. There was little beach there, and most of it was covered with driftwood, pebbles and great heaps of shells. I did not think we could take the horses across it, not even if we dismounted and led them on foot. It seemed that we could follow the dolphins no further. And then I saw Liljana looking out to sea, and I looked, too. The dolphins had ceased their tireless swimming and were now gathered together in the rippling water. They whistled and clicked at us with great urgency. And all of their long, smiling faces were pointed straight toward the cove.

Liljana, of course, needed no further encouragement to dismount and begin searching along the beach. And neither did the rest of us. After we had tied the horses to a couple of great logs, we walked among the piles of shells, crunching them with our boots. Here and there, upon catching a glimpse of a pretty pebble or a golden shell, we would pause and drop to our knees as we dug at the beach. With every passing moment, as our breaths rushed in and out and the surf pounded wildly, it seemed more and more likely that Sartan Odinan had died here after all.

Time and the relentless wash of the waves, we supposed, had buried his bones beneath layers of shells and sand. If we dug in the right place, we might find his remains – and the Lightstone.

All that long afternoon we searched there. Twice I thought I'd caught a glimpse of it.

But we found no golden cup nor any other thing made by the hand of man – or the angels. We might have given up if the dolphins had swum away. And then at last, with the sun falling down toward the ocean like a flaming arrow, Liljana let out a little cry. She bent down and plucked something from the carpet of shells. She held it up in the slanting light for us all to see.

'What is it?' Maram asked, stepping over to her. 'It looks like glass.'

'Driftglass,' Master Juwain said, looking at it. 'I used to collect such things when I was a boy.'

The driftglass, if that it truly was, was deep blue in color and about the size of Liljana's thumb. It was old and chipped and scoured smooth by the sea.

'It looks like a whale,' Maram said. 'Don't you think?'

As Liljana turned it over and over in her tapering fingers, we saw that it was cast into a little figurine shaped like a whale. What it had been used for or how it had come here, no one could say.

And then Liljana suddenly made a fist around the glass and pressed it against the side of her head. Her eyes glazed as they stared out at the dolphins and then closed altogether.

'Liljana,' Master Juwain said to her, 'are you all right?'

But she didn't answer him. She just stood there utterly still facing the sea. Strangely, the dolphins also fell silent. The only sounds about us were the cries of the seagulls along the cliffs and the ocean's long, dark roar. We were all concerned for Liljana, but we knew not to speak lest the spell be broken. And so we gathered around her, breathing in the smells of seaweed and the salty spray thrown up by the crash of the water against the rocks.

At last Liljana opened her eyes and smiled as she nodded her head She looked down at the figurine gleaming dark blue in the palm of her hand. And then she said, 'This is no driftglass.'

Master Juwain bent his bald head down to get a better look at the figurine. He asked,

'May I see it?'

Liijana rather reluctantly gave it to him, and he turned it beneath his sparkling gray eyes.

'It's a gelstei,' Liljana said. 'Surely it is a gelstei.'

Master Juwain's bushy eyebrows pulled together as he looked at the figurine more closely.

'I spoke with the Sea People,' Liljana said. 'I could hear their words inside me.'

The blue gelstei, I recalled as I looked at the figurine, were the stones of truthsaying, languages and dreams. In certain gifted people, they also quickened the power of speaking mind to mind.

'I see, I see,' Master Juwain said, giving back the figurine. 'I believe it is a blue gelstei.'

We all crowded close to Liljana to get a better look at the stone. Kane's eyes shone with a deep light and for a moment seemed as blue as the sea.

'I didn't know you had the power of mindspeaking,' he said to Liljana as he looked at her strangely. 'It's very rare these days, eh?'

'I didn't know myself,' Liljana told him. 'I've never been good at much more than cooking and sniffing out poisons.'

She spoke with modesty, and there was little pride in her bearing. Yet something in her quiet composure gave me to suspect that finding the blue figurine and speaking with the dolphins had confirmed a secret sense she had of herself.

'Well,' Maram called out to her, 'what did the Sea People say, then? Did they tell of the Lightstone? Is it here?'

He looked farther down the beach at the shells piled up against a jutting black rock.

He looked at the driftwood, at the cliffs, and his face was lit up with hope.

'No, they know nothing of the Lightstone,' Liljana said. They don't even understand what such a thing might be.'

'Ah, I hardly understand myself,' Maram said. 'But surely if they knew about your gelstei, they would have known about the Lightstone.'

'You're thinking like a man,' she said to him. 'But the Sea People don't think like we do.'

'Then they can't help us, can they?'

'Don't you give up so easily, my dear,' she scolded him. 'The Sea People are kind creatures, and they like puzzles as much as play. They've called others of their kind to come and talk with me.'

'Other dolphins?'

'I don't know,' she said. 'They called them the Old Ones.'

We looked out away from the land where the dolphins still swam in lazy circles around each other. Now the sun had disappeared into the ocean, and the blueness had left the water as if suddenly sucked away. Long, dark waves moved upon the darker deeps as the light slowly bled from the horizon. In the dusky sea, the dolphins waited, as did we. We stood on the windy beach looking out at the edge of the world where the evening's first stars blazed out of the immense, blue-black sky.

They cast their silver rays upon the onstreaming waters and the great, gray shapes rising up from them. There, in the cold ocean, in that strange time that is neither day nor night, six immense whales suddenly broke the surface and blew their spray high into the air. Master Juwain, who knew about such things, named their kind as the Mysticeti. But I thought of them as Liljana did, and called them simply the Old Ones.

For a while, they spoke with one another in their long, mournful songs that were more like moans than music. Their great voices seemed to still the whole world. And then, as Liljana again pressed the blue gelstei against her head, they too fell silent.

The stars filled the heavens and slowly turned above the shimmering sea.

This time, Liljana did not open her eyes. She stood nearly motionless on the shell-strewn beach. If not for the slow rise and fall of her breath, we would have thought that she had turned to stone.

'Master Juwain,' Maram said softly after some minutes had passed, 'what shall we do?'

'Do? What is there to do but wait?' Master Juwain said. Then he sighed and told him,

'I'm afraid the blestei are dangerous stones. I've always believed that the knowledge to use them has long been lost.'

But this was not good enough for Atara. She came up to Liljana and brushed the wind-whipped hair away from her face.

'We shouldn't just leave her like this,' she said, nodding at me. 'Horses can stand all night, but not a woman. Val, will you help me?'

I was afraid to touch Liljana just then, but together Atara and I, with Maram's help, managed to sit her down against a large rock feeing the sea. Atara joined her there on the sand. She sat holding Liljana's free hand while Liljana continued holding the gelstei tightly to her head.

'Now we can wait,' Atara said. She looked out at the starlit spherethat was the world.

And wait we did. At first, none of us thought that Liljana would sit there entranced all night. We kept looking for some sign that she might open her eyes or the whales grow tired and swim away. But as a yellow half-moon rose in the east and the hours passed, we resigned ourselves to watching over Liljana for as long as it took. Maram got a fire out of some driftwood that he piled up nearby while Master Juwain managed to make us a meal of steamed clams and hotcakes. It was midnight by the time Alphanderry and Kane washed the dishes by the water's edge, and still Liljana did not move.

'I'm afraid for her,' Maram said to me as the fire burned lower. It, cast its flickering light over Liljana's stricken face. 'You met minds with Morjin in your dreams, and it nearly drove you mad. What must it be like to speak this way with a whale?'

'Here, now,' Master Juwain said crabbily. He knelt in front of Lilljana testing the pulse in her wrist.' I've told you a hundred times not to name the Lord of Lies. And to name him in the same breath as the Old Ones – well that is madness.'

He went on to say that the Sea People had never been known to make war or take their vengeance upon men, not even when men put their harpoons into them. Indeed the Sea People, through many long ages, had often rescued shipwrecked sailors from drowning, swimming up beneath them so that they could breathe and taking them toward land.

'That is true,' Kane said in a faraway voice. 'I've seen it myself.'

I thought about this as I sat on the cool sand and watched the great whales floating on the luminous surface of the sea. How was it I wondered, that the Sea People had forsworn war where men had not? Had the Galadin sent them from the stars before even Elahad and Aryu and the stealing of the Lightstone? What would it be like to talk to such beings who obeyed the Law of the One so faithfully?

I waited there on the dark beach for Liljana to look at me and answer these questions. The wind blew across the water, from what source no one knew. The waves continued pounding against the shore like the beating of a vast and immortal heart. And the stars rose and fell into the blackness beyond the world and made me wonder if they were really distant suns or some kind of light-giving crystals created every night anew. It was nearly dawn when Liljana opened her eyes and looked at us.

As if saying goodbye, the whales sang their unfathomable songs and struck the water with their great tails. Then, along with the dolphins, they dove into the sea and swam away.

'Well,' Master Juwain said, as he knelt near Liljana, 'did you under-stand them? What did they tell you?'

But Atara, still sitting by Liljana, held up her hand protectively and said, 'Give her a moment, please.'

Liljana slowly stood up and walked back and forth along the water's edge. And then she turned and said, 'They told me many things.'

It was impossible for her to recount all that had passed between her and the Old Ones in their hours of conversation together. Nor, it seemed, did she wish to. She liked keeping secrets to herself almost as much as she delighted in bestowing upon others her cooking and her care. But she did admit that the Sea People were very doubtful of men.

'They said we were free,' she told us. 'They said that we were free but didn't know it.

And not knowing this, that we weren't. They said we made chains – this is my word – out of our harpoons- and ships and swords, and everything else. They said that wanting to master the world, we are made slaves of it. And so thinking ourselves cursed, we are. A cursed people bring death to themselves, and to the world. And worse, we bring forgetfulness of who we really are.'

She grew silent as the ocean sent its waves breaking against the shore. And then Master Juwain said, 'They must hate us very much.'

'No, my dear, it is just the opposite,' she said. 'Once, in the Age of the Mother, there was a great love between our kinds. They gave us their songs and we gave them ours. But at the end of the age, the Aryans came. Their wars destroyed all that. They hunted down all the sisters who could speak mind to mind to oppose them. Then they gathered up the blue gelstei and cast them into the sea.'

The Aryans, of course, had brought their swords to Tria – and the Age of Swords to all of Ea. They had prepared the way for the rise of Morjin, who hated the Sea People because he could find no way to make them serve him.

'It was the Red Dragon,' she said, 'who first began the hunting of the whales. The Old Ones told me that it had something to do with blood.'

'So,' Kane said in his grimmest voic, 'I've seen whale blood, too bad. It's darker than ours, redder and richer. To the Kallimun priests, it must be like gold.'

'To the Sea People,' Liljana said, 'our hunting of them is as much an abomination as if we hunted and ate our own kind. They think we've fallen mad.'

'Perhaps we have,' I said as I touched the hilt of my broken sword.

'So, it's a dark time,' Kane said. 'A dark age. But there will be others to come.'

Liljana scooped up a handful of wet sand and held it to the side of her face as if to ease a burning there. Then she said, 'The Old Ones spoke of that. They remember a time before we came to Ea. And they've told of a time when we will leave again, too.'

I stood a few yards from the crashing waves as I thought about this. I remembered what Master Juwain had once taught me about the beginning of the Age of Law. In those years, all of Ea had been sickened by the slaughter of the preceding age, and the peoples of all lands wanted only to return to their birthplace in the stars. But in the year 461, the great remembrancer, Sansu Medelin, had recalled the long-forgotten Elahad and his purpose in coming to earth. Sansu said that men and women must follow the Law of the One and create a new civilization before returning to their source. All who listened to him – they called themselves the Followers – fell out violently with the Retumists who wanted immediately to set out on ships and sail the cold seas of space. The War of the Two Stars, a great war lasting a hundred years, had been fought over these two different paths for humankind. Perhaps, I thought, in ages yet to come, other such wars would be fought as well.

'This must be the time,' Master Juwain said, giving voice to the old dream of the Brotherhoods – and many others besides, 'The earth has entered the Golden Band, this we know. Somewhere on Ea, the Maitreya has been born. It may be he who will lead the return to the stars.'

'Return?' Liijana said. 'What have we made here on earth? Ashes. The Red Dragon has burned all that was best of Ea to the ground. Should we return to the Star People bearing ashes in our hands?'

'What would you do, then, sow them into the soil and hope tea gardens to grow?'

'From the ashes of its funeral pyre,' she said, 'the silver swan is reborn. There was a time when we built the Gardens of the Earth and the Temples of Life. And there will be a time when we will build them again.'

'But what of our leaving Ea that your Old Ones have told of?'

'We will leave someday, they say. They say we will leave either in glory or death.

The Old Ones are waiting to see which it will be.'

She paused a moment, then said, 'They are waiting for us – waiung to welcome the Ardun to the higher orders.'

The Ardun, she explained, was her word for what the whales called the earth people.

I turned toward the ocean to see if I could catch one last sight of them. But the waters were empty.

'Well, I'll choose glory, then,' Maram put in. 'It's what man was born for, isn't it?'

'And for what were women born?' Liljana asked. 'Being locked inside their houses while men burn down their cities and spill each other's blood?'

At this Kane came forward and glared at Maram. Then he turned his gaze on Liljana and said, 'Whether the next age is one of darkness or light won't be decided just by men and women. All beings, I think, will play a part in what's to come. Maybe even the whales.'

Now he, too, looked out over the ocean. But aside from the ebbing of the tide, the only movement in that direction came from Flick as he darted and whirled among the sparkling waves.

I said to Liljana, 'Did you ask them about the Lightstone?'

Everyone, even Flick, moved a little closer to Liljana. And she said, 'Of course I did.

I think it amuses them that we're seeking a thing, true gold or not, however powerful it might be.'

'And what do they seek, then?' I asked.

'Just life, my dear. The wisdom to live life as it should be.'

And that, I thought, as I looked at the golden cup that I saw gleaming from the rocks of the cliff, was a truly' a great dream. But how, I wondered, could life be lived at all if a darkness that had no end fell upon the earth like a cold winter night?

'Do the Old Ones know where the Lightstone is?' I asked.

'They know where something is,' she said. 'They told me of a stone that gives much light.'

'Many stones give light,' Master Juwain said. 'Even the glowstones and the lesser gelstei.'

'This is no glowstone, I think,' she said. 'The Old Ones told of an island to the west where there is a great crystal. It's the most powerful gelstei they've ever sensed.'

'Yeas, but is it the Gelstei?'

'I wish I knew,' she said to him.

Master Juwain held out a trembling finger to touch the figurine that Liljana was now staring at. Then he asked, 'Did the Old Ones tell what island this is?'

We all awaited the answer to this question as we held our breaths and looked at Liljana.

'Almost, they did,' she said. 'But their words are not our words. Understanding their names is like trying to grab hold of water.'

'I see,' Master Juwain said. 'But did they say where this island is, then?'

'It must be. west of here – they said the evening sun sets upon it.'

'Very good, but how would anyone get to it? The whales must know.'

'Of course they do,' she said. 'But they don't steer by the stars, as we do. I think they… make pictures of the land and sea with sounds. With their words. When they speak to each other, they see these maps of the world. But I couldn't.'

'You couldn't see anything, then?'

'Only the shape of the island. It looked something like a seahorse.'

At this news, Master Juwain grew silent as his luminous eyes looked out toward the ocean.

Maram, still the student of the Brotherhood despite his failings, said, 'Nedu and Thalu lie to the west of here. And so do ten thousand other islands. Who would ever know if any of them were shaped like a seahorse?'

As it happened, Master Juwain did. The knowledge that he had gained from old books always astonished me. As did his memory.

'When I was a novice,' he told us, 'I read of a little island off Thalu where great flocks of swans gathered each spring. It was called the Island of the Swans, though it was said to be shaped like a seahorse.'

Now I, too, stared out at the ocean to the west. The sun was rising behind me; in the touch of its golden rays upon the world, I saw the Lightstone gleaming beyond the wild blue waters.

'We must go there, then,' I said.

I looked at Atara and Kane; I looked at Maram, Master Juwain, Alphanderry and Liljana. I couldn't hear the words of affirmation they spoke to themselves. But I didn't need a blue gelstei to know that their thoughts were mine.

'But, Val,' Master Juwain said to me, 'the account of this island that I read was old.

There have been great wars since then. The firestones opened up the earth, you know. And the earth took back its own, in cataclysm and in fire. Many of the islands off Nedu and Thalu were blasted into rocks, utterly destroyed. Now the sea covers them.'

'The Old Ones told of this island,' I said. 'So it must still exist.'

A troubled look came over Liljana's face, and I asked her, 'What's wrong?'

'The Old Ones told of this island, yes,' she said. 'But I think they don't see time as we do. For them, what has been still is – and always will be.'

'They sound like scryers,' Maram said, smiling at Atara.

Atara smiled back at him. 'No, a scryer would say what will be always was. And never quite is.'

'And what does this server say?' I asked, smiling at her, too.

'Why, that we should search for this island. Of course we should.'

We decided to celebrate our passage of the Vardaloon and Liljana's great feat of speaking with the Sea People. We filled our cups with brandy, clinked them together, and drank to our resolve to find the Island of the Swans. As the fiery liquor warned my throat and the sun warmed the world, I looked down at the silver swan shining from my surcoat. The Old Ones' revelation about the island, I sensed, was a great, good omen. For the swan was not only sacred to the Valari but a sign of bright things to come.