Diamond Warriors

but the two of them stood side by side on the hill looking up at me in anticipation. So it was with King Viromar, King Waray and King Danashu.

Others mounted the hill as well: King Hanniban and King Tal and King Aryaman of Thalu, who would be known hereafter as Aryaman Bloodaxe for the terrible deeds that he had done at the Detheshaloon that day. Great warriors who were not sovereigns stood with them: Thaman of Surrapam and Vareva Tomavar and Ymiru, whose white fur the ferocious combat with the Hesperuks and Yarkonan phalanxes had soaked almost completely red. And perhaps the greatest of warriors, and of all those who had fought upon the battlefield: Sar Maram Marshayk. For he had slain a dragon.

I watched my best friend slowly make his way through the parting Kaashan and Sakayan lines from the Hill of Fire. There, the great body of Yormungand lay where it had fallen, broken and burned. Maram himself had been burned, and badly, for Yormungand's flames had singed off his eyebrows and incinerated his beard and blistered much of his face a bright red. His left arm hung encased in charred leather and diamonds, and he could not use his blackened left hand. But in his right hand, he still clutched his bright red gelstei. As he drew closer to me, he held the great firestone high above his head as if showing me the sun itself.

'We're alive!' he cried out to me. 'O Lord! blessedly and beautifully alive! And dragonslayers, now, the both of us!'

He looked down at Morjin's hacked body, near the cross. So did Zahur Tey and King Angand, and many others. All seemed disgusted to perceive Morjin's true face: old and withered and ugly beyond anything they had ever imagined. And yet I thought that perhaps they could see in him, too, a terrible beauty for having finally found peace in death. The sight of the great Red Dragon lying so still I sensed, shocked everyone gathered at the top of the hill into waking up, as from a bad dream.

'I was a fool,' Zahur Tey called out, 'for thinking that Morjin could have been the Maitreya.'

He turned his gaze from Morjin's body to look up at Estrella, standing beneath the cross, and so did thousands of others.

'We were all fools,' King Orunjan said.

Then King Angand, like a hawk alert to the shifting of the wind, called out: 'We followed Morjin because we thought he could unite Ea. But we were wrong.'

King Angand, a cunning and calculating man did not speak the whole truth, for men had mostly gathered to the Red Dragon's standard because Morjin had terrorized them. But it didn't matter. King Angand, and others, seemed finally freed from Morjin's spell, and that was a very great thing.

'Many of us were wrong about many matters,' King Mohan called out. This fierce warrior had matched swords with King Angand's Sunguruns that day, and he gazed at King Angand in a silent understanding. Then he spoke of his hope for Ea, and his new dream shone forth in words that astonished me: 'I have fought in battles nearly every year since I was seventeen. I am tired of war. I long for peace. Once, in the time of Godavanni the Glorious in the Age of Law, Ea had a High King — and peace reigned across the world.'

Kane, standing next to him, drew his sword and raised it up toward me. In his rich, powerful voice, he called out: 'King of Ea! Let us recognize Valashu Elahad as Ea's rightful High King!'

Then he stepped foward to lay his sword at my feet, for he would never wield steel in war again.

'King of Ea!' King Mohan shouted, drawing his sword. 'King Valamesh! King of Kings!'

'King Valamesh!' King Viromar called out, also raising up his kalama to me. Then all the remaining Valari kings drew their swords, and added their voices to his:

'King Valamesh shall be our king!'

'Valamesh, High King!' King Angand acclaimed me. 'Let all who stand here now make it so!'

His will to see Ea united under one banner persuaded King Orunjan and King Thaddeu of Hesperu and others who had followed the Red Dragon. King Hanniban and the Free Kings likewise seemed swept away by the magic of that moment. They knelt before me, and set their swords on the ground at my feet. And they cried out with one voice:

'King Valamesh! King of Ea!'

Bajorak, however, although my friend, would not call me his king, for no Sarni chieftain would ever call any man king. But he, like Vishakan and most of the other Sarni chiefs — even Gorgorak's son, Artamax, the new leader of the Marituk — clearly saw that no Sarni tribe could now stand alone. Even as no alliance of tribes could stand against Sajagax and the High King of more than twenty kingdoms. And so, then and there, at the top of the Owl's Hill, the Sarni chieftains made Sajagax their Great Chief. And then Sajagax, with arrows sticking out of him like a porcupine's quills, came up to me.

'There will be a High King for Ea!' he called out in a voice that shook the earth like thunder. 'And a new law for Ea, that is just the Law of the One! Let none oppose it, or else be prepared to oppose all the Sarni! And let all the Sarni, who kneel to no man, even a king, honor one who must be a lord to even the greatest of kings!'

So saying, with a great struggle and will to overcome pain, he dropped down to one knee on the slope beneath me. Then he looked up and cried out, 'Lord of Light!'

At first I thought that he must have forgotten that I could not be the Maitreya; then I realized that he was looking past me, up at Estrella, who stood behind me holding high the Lightstone. Her face shone with a lovely radiance as the voices of kings and Sarni chieftains — and many others — rang out into the air: 'Lord of Light!'

Then I, too, turned and knelt before Estrella: a twelve-year-old girl holding a plain golden cup in her hands. I pressed my sword to the bloodstained grass beneath her feet as I added my voice to the multitudes crying out: 'Lord of Light! Lord of Light! Lord of Light!'

At last, when Estrella could bear this acclaim no longer, she motioned for me, and everyone else, to stand back up. She set her hand upon my hand and gently urged me to slide my sword back into its sheath. Her face lit up with the brightest of smiles. Then she fell against me weeping, hugging my hard armor close to her, kissing my palms and fingers and then standing up on tiptoes to press her lips against my lips, my face and my hot, hurting eyes.

The war, I thought, weeping too, was finally over.

Chapter 25

Then Estrella set her hand over my heart, and the pain that pierced me there went away. She touched the wound that Morjin had torn into my cheek; she turned to lay her hands on Maram's charred hand and upon Atara's bloody shoulder and her face. After that, Estrella went among the wounded, touching men's pierced bellies, hacked limbs and smashed heads. Many of these found their wounds suddenly healed; many of the dying, she kept from going over to the land of the dead. But she could not, it seemed, bring anyone back from that mysterious place, as she had me. Even a Maitreya, I thought, could work only so many miracles. And with tens of thousands of men and women lying upon the grass, it must have broken her heart that she had the power to help only a very few of them.

We began the burials that day. With such a great death coming upon the steppe, the sky above the battlefield filled with clouds of carrion birds. I had to ask Sajagax to set his warriors driving off the lions, wolves and jackals that would have taken away those who had fallen. The Sarni, of course, preferred such a fate and found great honor that their bodies should nourish other living things. But even the Sarni saw that too many of their warriors had died and could not be disposed of in such a way. And so they worked as hard as anyone, from the Dragon's army or my own, digging down through the steppe's tough sod. We arrayed the graves in ever widening rings of mounded earth and stone that spread out down the gentle slopes of the Owl's Hill. Near the top, we buried Morjin where he had died. And at the very top, after we had taken down the cross and wrapped Bemossed's body in a shroud that Liljana made, we set our friend deep into the earth. Maram used his red gelstei against the rocks of the Detheshaloon to cut a great stone in the shape of a cross. We mounted it over the head of Bemossed's grave to mark what happened here. Because I thought both Bemossed and I, in the end, had found the same truth, I asked Maram to burn into the stone the same words that the battle had burned into my soul:

With his eye of compassion