Diamond Warriors

I hoped that Vareva might see the sense of what I said to her, for I was too tired to argue with her, and many more warriors stood lined up outside my tent. But Vareva, who had often defeated me at riddles and word games when we were children, seemed not very tired at all, and she had the better argument:

'It is not the Valari way, you say, that women should go to war,' she told me. 'Or else our people will dwindle and begin to die. But, Sire, this war will be a war to the death for the whole Valari people. I know, for I have heard Morjin himself talk of making whole forests into crosses. If we do not fight this war down to the last breath of every man — and woman — we shall lose. And then the Valari will be no more.'

I felt her impassioned breath spilling over my face like fire, I could find no logic to dispute her. And yet I could not, I thought, allow her to march with the army.

'You are a warrior,' I said to her, 'and let no one doubt that.'

I called for Joshu Kadar, one of the knights standing by my side that afternoon, to bring me a wooden box full of rings. I took out one of them — the smallest, set with a single, bright diamond — and I slipped it around Vareva's finger. She seemed delighted to be honored this way.

'Wear this ring,' I said to her, 'that all may recognize a true Valari warrior.'

Lord Avijan and Lord Jessu — Sar Shivalad and other knights, too, who happened to be present — reluctantly rapped their rings against the hilts of their swords in a great sound that nearly drowned out the patter of the rain. Vareva gazed in wonder at the ring encircling her finger; I sensed that she valued it much more than the diamond brooch over which Lord Tanu and Lord Tomavar had nearly gone to war.

But then her happiness seemed to melt away as I said to her, 'I cannot take every warrior with me, and so leave Mesh defenseless. Many will remain, and you must be one of them.'

At this, she had no choice but to bow her head in acceptance of what I had said.

'But I charge you with a task,' I said to her. 'Other women feel as you do. Behira Harsha, for one. I fear they will train at arms no matter what their king says. Seek them out, then. Train them as warriors against the day we all fear will come.'

Vareva looked at me with hope brightening her face again. 'Thank you, Sire. I shall train a whole battalion of warriors such as the world has never seen!'

Then she turned about and left my tent, and another warrior came forward to tell me his name. And another, and another after that, and then a thousand others. And so the day passed into yet another night.

The next morning, to the sound of birds chittering in the meadows, Maram came into my tent. He bulled his way past the warriors lined up at the entrance and indicated that he wished to speak with me. We stepped off into the corner, where he murmured to me: 'Two full days and one whole night — and here you still are! You cannot continue this way!'

'I can continue!' I told him.

I had to fight the urge to lay my hand upon his huge shoulder for support.

'Ah, well, maybe you can,' he said, looking deep into my eyes. 'But you shouldn 't. It is too much — too, too much.'

'I have faced worse trials before, Maram. We have.'

'At need, we have. In the Red Desert, you drove yourself harder than any man would a slave — even as you drove me. And it kept us alive. But this isn't necessary.'

I looked off toward the tent's entranceway, where I could see a dozen men in diamond armor standing miserably in the rain.

'Some might say,' he told me, 'that this is only a new king's vanity. A great show without true meaning.'

'Do you say that, then?'

'I? No, I don't, and I am a man who knows about vanity. But I do say that you are overzealous. Nearly killing yourself to prove your worthiness as a king.'

I fought to keep myself from yawning and rubbing the sleep from my dry, itching eyes; I fought not to go over to my canopied bed and collapse into unknowingness.

'And more,' Maram went on, 'this desperate learning of names has the taint of thaumaturgy. As if in holding on to one of your men's names, you can magically keep him from dying when his time comes.'

His words worked their way into my hot, pounding brain, and I found myself forced to consider them. Finally, I said to him, 'You know me too well, old friend.'

'Then break off and sleep! Just this one day! And tomorrow finish your task, or the next!'

I slowly shook my head at this. 'A day will come when I must face Morjin. On that day, I will not be able to break off and sleep, no matter how tired I am.'

'But you can't prepare for that like this. It is madness to — '

'The day will come,' I said to him again. 'And when it does, no matter what I do, many of the men I have greeted in this tent will die. But how many, then? If it is not to be all of them, then I fear that we will have to fight such as the Valari have never fought before. As men have never fought. We are so few, and our enemy is so many. We cannot defeat them through force of arms alone — this the wisest of the wise has told me. All we will have, in the end, is our spirits. And if our spirits are to be as one, and we are to die for each other — and live! — then I must know who my warriors are, and they must know me.'

Maram, suddenly understanding, nodded his head to me. He sighed, long and deeply, as he looked at me. Then he drew his sword and with great sadness said, 'Sire, I am Maram Marshayk, son of Santoval Marshayk, of Delarid. I pledge my sword to you, in life and in death!'

After he had gone, I spent the rest of that morning, afternoon and evening as I had the days before. It seemed to me that I must have spoken with fifteen million men, and not fifteen thousand. I finally summoned Lord Tanu, and asked him, 'How many more?'

'Nearly a thousand, Sire.'

'And is that all, then?'

Lord Tanu hesitated as his old face tightened with weariness. It seemed that he had slept little, either, over the past days.

'There are only the warriors,' he said to me, 'who refused to stand for you on the day you were acclaimed — eighty-nine of them. It was thought that you wouldn't want to know their names.'

As a king, of course, I now had the right to command every man in Mesh, and not just those who had acclaimed me. But I would rather lead them. And so I said to Lord Tanu, and to Lord Avijan and Lord Sharad also present and bending over the map table: 'It takes courage to stand against the enemy in battle. But it takes a deeper and truer courage to stand out by keeping to one's convictions when almost everyone is taking a different course. I do not know why the men you have spoken of failed to stand for me. Their reasons are their reasons. But those men I especially want to honor. I can tell you that when battle finally comes, none will stand more valiantly.'

As I had requested of Lord Tanu, he made it be. I endured the last hours of my vigil greeting the last of my warriors. I learned the names of those who had refused to stand for me but now must follow me to war: Ianadar Elshan, Yarsar Ralvalam, Juvalad the Elder, Marsavay of Mir… and all eighty-five others.

At last, there came a moment when the open flaps at the front of my tent revealed only the campfires of my army flickering in the dark and the vast, starry sky. I stepped outside beneath these glistening lights. I had spoken with more than fifteen thousand men. As I pointed my sword toward the bright heavens, I felt a brighter thing burning behind my eyes, and I knew that all fifteen thousand of their names blazed somewhere inside me.

It was a moment of great triumph. I dared to think, for one shining instant in time, that my warriors and I could wield our swords as one and utterly vanquish Morjin. I willed this to be, with all the might of my mind and the force of my heart.

And then I chanced to think of Atara riding blindly across the plains somewhere in the dark world to the west. In my utter exhaustion, fighting the leaden pain in my eyes and to keep from collapsing onto the trampled grass, I let my desire to defeat Morjin descend into a wrath for vengeance. I saw myself gouging out his eyes as he had Atara's; I wanted to repay him death for death, and hate for hate. I longed for this one, last battle to the very bottom of my soul. I knew that this terrible urge was as beneath me as I should be beyond it. But I couldn't seem to help it. It came welling up through me like a dark dream through sleep.