The Lightstone

Chapter 36

It is strange that compassion can be a force powerful enough almost to stop the turning of the world. Maram, standing by my side, his frozen fingers fumbling in his pocket finally managed to draw forth his red crystal. He held it clamped between his hands, pointing it at the Frost Giants. His terrified voice wheezed in my ears, 'Val – should I burn them?'

And then, as he remembered his vow never again to turn fire against men, his hands shook and he couldn't quite use it. His hesitation saved our lives,

'Hrold!' one of the frost Giants suddenly called out. 'Hrold now!'

The white-furred men halted twenty feet from us in a ring around us. Their spiked clubs wavered in the air.

The Frost Giant who had spoken, a vastly thick man with a broken nose and eyes the color of a frozen waterfall, pointed at Maram's crystal and said, 'It is a firestone.'

The man next to him in the circle peered through the snow at us and said, 'Are you sure, Ymiru?'

Ymiru slowly nodded his head. Then his large blue eyes squinted as they fixed on the sword that I held ready at my side. With the moment of my death at hand, Alkaladur began shimmering with a soft silver light.

'And that is sarastria,' he said. His huge, deep voice rumbled out into the pass like thunder. 'it must be sarastria.'

Sarastria. I thought Silustria. The Frost Giants spoke familiar words with a strange turning of the tongue, but I could still understand what they said.

'Little man,' Ymiru said, pointing his club at me, 'how came you to find sarastria?'

It astonished me that this savage seeming Frost Giant should know anything at all about the silver gelstei – or the firestones. I looked at him and said, 'It was acquired on a journey.'

'What kind of journey?'

I traded quick looks with Kane and Atara; I was reluctant to tell these strange men of our quest.

'Come!' Ymiru roared out, raising up his club. 'Speak now! And speak truthfully or else you and your friends will soon find death.'

I had a strange sense that I could trust this giant man – to do exactly as he said. And so I opened my cloak to show him the gold medallion that King Kiritan had placed there. I told him of the great gathering in Tria and of our vows to seek the Lightstone.

'You speak of the Galastei, yes?' Ymiru said. His eyes lit up with a sudden fire, and so did those of his companions. 'You speak of the golden cup made by the Galadin and brought down from stars? It is a marvelous substance, this gold galastei, this Stone of Light Inside it is the secret of making all other galastei – and the secret of making itself.'

He went on to say that the Lightstone was the very radiance of the One made manifest – and therefore that which moved the very stars and earth and all that occurred upon it.

'But for one entire elu, the Lightstone has been lost,' Ymiru said, losing himself in his thoughts. 'And so all hope for Ea has been lost, too.'

He paused to take a deep breath and then let it out in a cloud of steam. Then, returning to the matter at hand, he continued, 'And now, you say, you hope it will be found. You've made vows to find it But find it where? Surely not in land of the Ymanir!'

'No, not in your land,' Kane said from behind me. 'We seek only to cross it as quickly as we can.'

'So you say. But cross it towards the east? That is land of Asakai.'

At the mention of this name, the Ymaniris' hands tightened around their clubs. Their savage faces grew even more savage and pulled into masks of hate.

I didn't want to tell Ymiru that we proposed to cross Sakai and enter Argattha to seek the Lightstone. I doubted that he would believe me; even more, I feared that he would.

'Perhaps they're really of Asakai,' a young-looking man near Ymiru said. 'Perhaps they're spies returning home.'

'No, Havru,'Ymiru said. 'They come from Yrakona, I am sure. They're not Morjin's kind.'

The giant young man named Havru, whose chin pointed like a spur of rock, shook his club at us and growled out, 'It's said that Morjin's kind have the power to seem like other kind. Shouldn't we kill them to be certain?'

Across the circle, a man with a reddish tint to his fur bellowed, 'Yes, kill them! Take the galastei, and let's be done!'

Others picked up his cry as they began thumping their clubs into the snow and calling out, 'Kill them! Kill them!'

'Hrold! Hrold now!' Ymiru shouted back at them, raising up his club.

Altaru, standing to the left of me, trembled as he shook his head at the falling snow and beat his hoof downward. Any of the Ymanir attacking me, I thought, would find themselves assaulted with the four terrible clubs attached to the ends of his legs.

'Hrold, Askir!' Ymiru said again to the man with the reddish fur.

But then, across the circle from him, a one-eyed giant let loose a tremendous cry and shook his club at us. He shouted, 'If they be Morjin's men, I'll break their bones to dust!'

This so alarmed Maram that he cringed and called out to me, 'Val! It's as I said!

They mean to kill us and eat us! They really do!'

The Ymanir may have been savages, but they were still men, with the same range of feelings as had other men. Ymiru turned his face toward Maram, and I could feel in him the same quick rush of emotions that surged through many of the Ymanir: astonishment, insult horror. Then their mood shifted yet again as Ymiru's pale lips pulled back in a sad, savage smile. He pointed his club at Maram and called out to his companions: 'You may have any of the others you want. But the fat one is mine!'

'Val!'

Ymiru's smile had now been taken up by the young Havru, who said, 'But, sir, that is unfair of you. Our rations have been thin, and I'm very hungry. I could get at least ten meals from him.'

'Ten?' a sardonic man named Lodur half-shouted. 'He's fat enough for twenty, I should think.'

'Let's roast him over coals!' another man said.

'No, let's make a soup of him!'

'All right,' Havru laughed out wickedly, 'but let's save his bones for our bread.'

All at once, the twenty Ymanir fell into a long and thunderous laughter. But there was no malice in their huge voices, only a vast amusement. They were only having a joke with Maram, and with us.

'Savages!' Maram shouted at them when he realized this. His face reddened as he wiped the sweat from it. 'It's cruel sport you make.'

'Cruel?' Ymiru coughed out. 'Was it any crueler than your suggestion that we are eaters of men?'

Maram didn't know what to say to this. He looked from Ymiru to me and then back at Ymiru as he stammered out, 'Well I had heard that… ah, that is to say, the Yarkonans believe that you are killers of men and -'

'Hrold your tongue!' Ymiru said, cutting him off. 'We're certainly killers of men: any who serve the Great Beast. And any who would enter our land without our leave.'

He suddenly motioned to Askir and two other men, who walked around the outside of the circle of the Ymanir and came over to him. While we stood shivering in the driving wind, they gathered in close with each other and conferred in low, rumbling tones.

After a while, Ymiru looked at Maram and said, 'You are certainly not of Asakai. No man of Morjin's would hrold a firestone against us and fail to use it. We thank you, little fat man, for your forbearance. We wouldn't have wanted to wind up roasted on your dinner plate.'

'Ah, well,' Maram said, 'thank you for your forbearance in letting us pass through -'

'Hrold your noise!' Ymiru commanded him. His furry hand suddenly tightened around his club. 'We have forborne nothing. You have set foot upon Elivagar and cast your eyes upon this sacred land. So by our law, you must be put to death.'

Maram's hand shook as he tried to position his gelstei so as to catch what little light filtered through the snow-gray clouds. And then I laid my hand on his shoulder to steady him. I waited on the cold, windy slope, looking up at Ymiru and the grim-faced Ymanir. And so did Kane, Liljana and my other companions.

'However, these are strange times, and you are a strange people,' he went on in his slow, sad way. 'You seek that which we seek, too. Our law is our law. But there is a higher law that speaks of things beyond the commonplace. Our elders are the keepers of it. It is to them that we will take you, if you are agreeable. The Urdahir shall decide your fate.'

I looked from Maram to Atara, then at Liljana and Master Juwain. Their nearly frozen faces told me that anything was better than standing here in this killing wind. But Kane was not so eager to offer up his surrender, nor was I. And so I turned to Ymiru and asked him, 'And what if this is not agreeable to us?'

'Then,' Ymiru said, raising high his club, 'the best that we can give you is a good burial. You have my promise we won't let the bears eat you.'

I saw that it would be hopeless to fight the Ymanir or to try to escape. And it seemed that our fate, in the hands of these giants, was sweeping us along, moving us step by step closer to Argattha. And so, speaking for the others, I told Ymiru that we would accompany them to the council of their elders.

'Thank you,' Ymiru said. 'I wouldn't have wanted your blood on my borkor.'

Here he patted his club as he looked at me. Then he asked our names, which we gave, and he told us theirs.

'Very good, Sar Valashu Elahad,' he said. 'Now if you'll just throw down your weapons, we'll blindfold you and take you to a place that only the Ymanir know.'

I could hardly feel my hands' grip around the hilt of Alkaladur, but I was sure it suddenly tightened. I couldn't let anyone touch my sword. And neither did my friends want to surrender their weapons.

'Come, Sar Valashu!'

'No,' I told him. 'My apologies, but we can't do as you ask.'

All at once, twenty thick borkors raised up like trees ready to crush us to the earth.

'Hrold!' Ymiru cried out yet again. He looked at me and asked, 'How can you think to walk armed into our land?'

'How can you think to blind us?' I countered.

For a long ten beats of my heart, Ymiru stared at me as we took each other's measure. I didn't have to tell him that at least a few of his people would die if they tried to kill us. And he didn't have to tell me that these deaths, ours included, would serve only our common enemy.

'Very well,' he said to me at last. 'You may keep your weapons. But while in Elivagar, you must keep your bows unstrung and your swords sheathed. Do you agree to this?'

'Yes,' I said, looking at my friends, 'we do.'

'But, Ymiru!' Askir suddenly shouted, 'what if they -'

'Sar Valashu,' Ymiru said, cutting him off, 'if you break your word, which I have accepted in good faith, the Elders will put me to death. And then you and your companions.'

There was a keenness to this huge man's gaze that cut right to my heart. Somehow, without being told, he knew that the possibility of my causing his death in this manner would bind my hands more surely that the tightest cords.

'But about the blindfolding,' he continued, 'there can be no argument. No one except the Ymanir can see the way toward the place we are taking you.'

In the end, we agreed on this compromise. It. was strange and disturbing to watch as they found a roll of red cloth in the pack that Havru bore and cut it up to fashion six blindfolds. Despite the hugeness of their hands, they worked quickly in the cold with an amazing dexterity. Ymiru appointed Havru to tie the blindfolds over our eyes, and this he did. He moved from Kane to Atara and Liljana, and then tied broad, red strips around Master Juwain's and Maram's heads and finally mine. As this great, furry being towered over me, I had to stand fast and steady Altaru, or else my ferocious horse would have kicked out in terror and wrath. I held my breath as the blindfold's soft fabric pulled tight over my eyes. With the world plunged into darkness, I suddenly noticed Havru's smell, which was of woodsmoke and wool and cold wind off a frozen lake.

Wise Ymiru also appointed Havru and four others to be our guides. He himself took my hand in his and began leading me up toward the pass. There was a comforting warmth and great strength in the press of his flesh against mine. I heard Maram sigh out behind me, and I could almost feel his fingers thawing in Havru's encompassing grip. Although none of us liked walking blind through the snow, the Ymanir had a friendship with this bitter substance that communicated to us through the sure, gentle pulling of hand against hand. It was remarkable, I thought, that we were led over ice and rocks, and none of us stumbled or tripped. In this way, from guide to guided, a seemingly unbreakable trust was born.

As Maram had feared, the rise toward which we climbed proved not to be the end of the pass. Ymiru, walking in front of me and leading me upward, was loath to say much about the mountains here. But he did tell us that our path would take us over a still higher rise, before descending into the difficult terrain beyond. From what he said, it was clear that we would have to spend the night at a very high elevation. But we would not have to spend it in the open. For the Ymanir, he told us, had built a hut that they used for sleeping less than a mile from where we stood.

In truth, this 'hut' turned out to be more like a fortress, as we found when we reached it a little later. Although Ymiru bade us keep our blindfolds on, the moment that we walked through the doorway of this unseen structure, I had a sense of a cold, vast, open space where the echoes of our snow-encrusted boots fell off of thick walls of stone. We were all shivering by the time the Ymanir closed the doors behind us and led us to what I took to be a sleeping area where thick wool mats were laid out in front a fire. As someone heaved on a few fresh logs, flames leaped out at us to thaw our frozen bodies. We were very glad for the heat, and gladder still for the bowls of steaming soup that our hosts ladled out into huge bowls and pressed into our hands. Their hospitality, I thought, was flawless. They gave their beds up to us, and took our boots away to be dried in front of the fire. They even served us a mulled cider that had almost as much flavor and punch as the finest Meshian beer.

'Ah, this isn't so bad,' Maram said, sipping his cider on the bed next to mine. 'In fact, it's really quite good.'

It was strange not being able to see the food that we ate or the drink that passed our lips. But soon it came time for lying back in our beds, and the darkness of our blindfolds gave way to that of sleep. We rested well that night. In the morning, the Ymanir served us porridge mixed with goat's milk, dried berries and nuts before we set out again.

As I could tell from the warmth of the sun on my face, we had a clear day for traveling. Half the Ymanir remained near their hut to guard the pass. One man Ymiru sent on ahead to alert the Elders of our coming. And then he and the remaining Ymanir led us even higher into the mountains.

We walked rather slowly for a couple of hours up a steep slope. And then, at the crest of the pass, where the wind blew so fiercely that it nearly ripped the blindfolds from our faces, we began a long descent through what seemed a chute of rock. We walked for a couple more hours, breaking only for a quick lunch. We offered the Ymanir some of the salted pork that we had tucked away in the horses' packs, but this food horrified them. Havru called us Eaters of Beasts; the loathing in his voice suggested that we might as well have been cannibals. Askir explained that although the Ymanir might borrow milk and wool from their goats, they would never think to take their meat. Their gentleness toward animals was only the first of the surprises that awaited us that day.

Our afternoon's journey took us down below the snowline, where Ymiru led us onto what felt like a broad dirt track. Here there were many more rocks to negotiate, which made the going much more difficult. The track turned sharply north and climbed steeply before veering eastward and downward again. I was as sure of these directions as I was of the beating of my heart. I didn't need the thin heat of the falling sun to tell me which way we walked. But I failed to mention this to Ymiru. He seemed content to lead me by the hand, whistling a sad song as he walked on a couple of paces ahead of me.

By early afternoon, the track turned yet again, this time toward the south. It rose in a series of snakelike switchbacks up what seemed to be the slopes of a good-sized mountain. Soon the smells of spruce and dirt gave way to ice as we again crossed onto a snowfield. Frozen crusts crunched beneath our feet. With my left hand in Ymiru's and my right hand pulling on Altaru's halter, I led my horse through some rather thick drifts of snow. We climbed ever higher. Maram, walking to the rear of me, puffed and wheezed in the thin, bitter air. I felt his fear that we would climb too high and fall to cold or sudden stroke of breathlessness. The burning in my lungs told me that I had never been so high in the mountains in all my life; my nearly frozen cheeks and the pulsing of my eyes against the blindfold told me that Maram's fears might soon become my own.

And then, without warning, we crested yet another pass. The wind shifted and blew strange scents against my face. I heard one of the Ymanir sigh out with anticipation as if he would soon be rejoined with his wife and family. Something very deep stirred in Ymiru, too. He led us down through the snow for perhaps a quarter of a mile to a more level ground where the wind didn't cut so keenly. And there, with the crest of the pass at our backs, he finally let go of my hand.

'Sar Valashu,' he said to me, 'we have come to the place that I have told of. None except the Ymanir have ever looked upon it And none ever must. And so I ask you, whatever fate befalls you, that you keep this sight to yourself. Do you agree to this?'

With the blindfold still tight around my eyes, I didn't know what I was agreeing to.

But 1 was eager to have it removed, so I said, 'Yes, we are agreed.'

Ymiru's voice carried out behind me as he called out, 'Prince Maram Marshayk, do you agree to this?'

And so it went, one by one, Ymiru formally calling each of us to pledge his silence, and each of us giving what he had asked. Then I felt his fingers at the back of my head working against the blindfold's knot. In a few moments, he had it off. The sun, even at this late hour, pierced my eyelids with such a dazzling white light that I could not open them. I stood toward the south with my hand to my forehead, trying to block out some of its intense radiance.

And then, as my eyes slowly adjusted to this new level of illumination, I fought them open, blinking against the stab of the tears there, blinking and blinking at the blinding haze of indistinct forms that was all I could perceive at first. And then my vision suddenly cleared. The features of the world came into sharp focus. And I, along with Atara, Maram and my other friends, drew in a sudden gasp of air almost with one breath. For there, spread out beneath the blue dome of the sky, was the most astonishing sight I had ever beheld.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram murmured quietly from behind me.

Far below us, a broad valley opened out between great walls of white-capped mountains. And in its center, built on either side of an ice-blue river, rose a city more marvelous than I had ever dreamed. It filled most of the valley. Although not as large as Tria, it had a splendor that even the Trians might have envied. Many great towers and spires, made of glittering sweeps of living stone, seemed to grow out of the valley's very rock. Some of these were half a mile high and nearly vanished into the sky. Their building stones were of carnelian and violet, azure and aquamarine and a thousand other soft shifting hues. The city's broad avenues and streets were laid out with precision from east to west and north to south as if to mark the four points of the world. The late afternoon sun poured dawn these thoroughfares like rivers of gold. The various palaces and temples caught up its light. But the magnificence of the buildings, I thought was not in their number nor even their size. Rather, it was their perfect proportions and sparkle that caught the eye and stirred the soul. The houses along even the side streets seemed to cast their colors at each other and reflect those of their neighbors. Their lovely lines and arrangement bespoke an almost seamless blending with the earth – and with each other. It was as if the whole city was a choir of sight, intoning deep and startling harmonies, giving the song of its beauty to the wind and the sky, to the moon and the sun and the stars.

Above the city, on the slope of a mountain to the east huge and fantastic sculptures gleamed. A few of these were diamond-like figures a mile high; near them, immense but delicate-looking crystals opened beneath the sun like glittering flowers. It seemed like something that only the Galadin themselves could have created. Ymiru saw me staring at it and told me that the Ymanir called this great work the Garden of the Gods.

As striking as were these marvels, they paled beneath the greatest giory of this place.

This was a mountain to the west that overlooked the whole valley. Ymiru said it was the highest mountain in the world. Standing above the lesser peaks to either side, it rose straight into the sky in a great upward thrust of stone and ice. It had an almost perfect symmetry, like that of a pyramid. Although its pointed summit and upper reaches were crowned in pure, white snow, the main body of it appeared to be made of amethyst emerald, sapphire and jewels of every color. I could not imagine how it had come to be.

'That is Alumit,' Ymiru said as he watched me and my friends staring at it. 'We call it the Mountain of the Morning Star.'

This name, as he spoke it in his deep voice that rumbled like thunder, stunned me into silence.

'And your city?' Maram asked, standing next to his horse behind us.

'What do you call it?'

'Its name is Alundil,' Ymiru told us. 'This means the City at the Stars in the old language.'

As the wind whipped swirls of snow about our legs, I stared down at this fantastic place for quite a while. It was strange. I thought that all the legends and old wives' tales had told of the Ymanir as only savage and man-eating Frost Giants. And with their fearsome borkors and harsh laws, savage they might truly have been. But they had built the most beautiful creation on earth. And no one, it seemed, except my companions and I, and the Ymanir themselves, had ever beheld it.

Kane, gazing down into the valley as if its splendor had swept him away to another world, suddenly looked at Ymiru and said, 'All these years, walking among the other cities of the world, and other mountains – even without wearing a blindfold, I might as well have been.'

'I've never imagined seeing such a thing,' Maram added, blinking his eyes. He looked up at Ymiru and asked, 'Did your people make this? How could they have?'

How, indeed, I wondered, staring down at the great sculptures of the Garden of the Gods? How could naked giants with spiked clubs have built a greater glory than had even the ancient architects of Tria during the great golden Age of Law? How could anyone?

'Yes, we did – that is who we Ymanir are,' Ymiru said proudly. 'We are workers of living stone; we are mountain shapers and gardeners of the earth.'

He went on to say that the Ymanir's greatest delight was in making things out of things. They especially loved coaxing out of the earth the secret and beautiful forms hidden there. Ymiru told us that his people were devoted to discovering how to forge substances of all kinds, and none more so than the gelstei crystals.

'But the secret of their making has been lost to us for most of an age,' he said sadly.

'At least the making of the greater galastei.'

'In other lands,' Master Juwain told him, 'it has been forgotten how to forge even the lesser gelstei.'

'So much has been lost,' Ymiru said bitterly. 'And that is why the Urdahir, some of them, seek the secret of the ultimate making.'

'And what is that?' Maram asked, staring at the jeweled mountain called Alumit.

'Why, the making of the golden crystal of the Galastei itself,' Ymiru said. 'That is why we, too, seek the cup you call the Lightstone. We believe that only the Lightstone itself will ever reveal the secret of how it was created.'

With this secret, he told us, the Ymanir could not only reforge the great gelstei crystals of old and a new Lightstone, but the very world itself.

That was a strange thought to take with us on our descent to the city. We followed a well-marked track that cut through the pass's snowfields and wound down through the treeline of the mountain beneath us. It was nearly dark before we came out of the mouth of a narrow canyon onto Alundil's heights. Immediately upon setting foot in this enchanting city, with its graceful houses and stands of silver shih trees, I had a strange sense of simultaneously walking my horse down a quiet street and standing a thousand miles high. The sweep of the great spires seemed to draw my soul up toward the stars. In this marvelous place, I was still very much of the earth and on it, never more so – and yet I felt myself suddenly opened like a living crystal that is transparent to other worlds and other realms. Lovely was my home in the Morning Mountains, and magical were the woods of the Lokilani, got in no other place on Ea had I felt myself to be so great and noble a being as I did here.

We proceeded through the streets and onto one of the city's broad avenues, all of which were deserted, likewise, no fire or light brightened the windows of the houses and buildings that we passed. Maram, somewhat vexed at this strangeness, asked Ymiru if his people had once been more numerous. Had they, he asked, abandoned this part of the city for other districts?

'Yes, once the Ymanir were a much greater people,' he told us. His voice was heavy with a bitter sadness. 'Once, we claimed nearly all of the mountains as our home. But when the Great Beast took the Black Mountain, he sent a plague to kill the Ymanir.

The survivors were too few to hrold. He drove us off, into the westernmost part of our realm -into Elivagar. He and his Red Priests did dreadful things to our hrome.

And thus sacred Sakai became Asakai, the accursed land.'

He went on to tell us that even before Morjin's rise, there had never been enough of his people to fill a city so large as Alundil. And as large as it was, it would grow only larger, for the Ymanir continued to add to it stone by stone and tower by tower as they had for thousands of years,

'I don't understand,' Maram said, blowing out his breath into the cold, darkening air.

'If Alundil is already too big for your people, why build it bigger?'

'Because,' Ymiru said, 'Alundil is not for us.'

The clopping of the horses' hooves against the stone of the street suddenly seemed too loud. Ymiru, Havru and Askir – and the other Ymanir – suddenly stood as straight and proud as any of the sculptures in the Garden of the Gods.

The look on Maram's face suggested that he was now totally mystified, as were the rest of us. And so Ymiru explained, 'Long ago, our scryers looked toward the stars and beheld cities on other worlds. It is our greatest hope to recreate on earth these visions that they saw.'

'But why?' Maram asked.

'Because someday the Star People will come again,' Ymiru said. 'They will come to earth and find prepared for them a new hrome.'

It was upon hearing this sad history and sad dreams of the future that Ymiru and the others took us to meet with their Elders. As Ymiru had said, Alundil was not for the Ymainr and so his people had built their own town in the foothills east of the valley.

This consisted mostly of great, long, stone houses arrayed on winding streets. The Ymanir had applied only a little of their art in raising up these constructions. None were of the marvelous living stone that farmed the buildings of the dark city below.

Rather, they were made of blocks of granite, cut with great precision and fitted together in sweeping arches that enclosed large spaces, The Ymanir, we soon found, liked open spaces and built their houses accordingly.

They had built their great hall this way, too. We approached this castle-like building along a rising road, lined with many Ymanir who had left their houses to witness the unprecedented arrival of strangers in their valley. Hundreds of these tali, white-furred people stood as straight and silent as the spruce trees that also lined the road. I caught a scent of the deep feelings that rumbled through them: anger, fear, curiosity, hope. There was a great sadness about them, and yet a fierce pride as well.

We tethered our horses to some trees outside the great hall. Inside it we all understood, the Ymanir called the Urdahir were waiting to decide our fate.