'Thank you for sparing an old man's joints,' Lord Harsha told him, patting his broken knee. 'Now if you will all accompany me, we'll collect my daughter and be on our way. She'll be joining us for the feast.'
So saying, Lord Harsha drove the groaning wagon across his fields while we followed him on horseback to his house. There, a rather plump, pretty woman with raven-dark hair stood in the doorway and watched us draw up. She was dressed in a silk gown and a flowing gray cloak gathered in above her ample breasts with a silver brooch. This was to be her first appearance at my father's casde, I gathered, and so she naturally wanted to be seen wearing her finest.
Lord Harsha stepped painfully down from his wagon and said, 'Lord Asaru, may I present my daughter, Behira?'
In turn, he presented this shy young woman to me, Joshu Kadar and Maram. To my dismay, Maram's face flushed a deep red at the first sight of her. I could almost feel his desire for her leaping like fire along his veins. Gone from him completely, it seemed, was any thought of beer.
'Oh, Lord, what a beauty!' he blurted out. 'Lord Harsha – you certainly have a talent for making beautiful things.'
It might have been thought that Lord Harsha would relish such a compliment.
Instead, his single eye glared at Maram like a heated iron. Most likely, I thought, he wished to present Behira at my father's court to some of the greatest knights of Mesh; he would take advantage of the night's gathering to make the best match for her that he could – and that certainly wouldn't be a marriage to some cowardly outland prince who had forsworn wine, women and war.
'My daughter,' Lord Harsha coldly informed Maram, 'is not a thing. But thank you all the same,'
He limped over to his barn then, and returned a short time later leading a huge, gray mare. Despite the pain of his knee, he insisted on riding to my father's castle with all the dignity that he could command.
And so he gritted his teeth as he pulled himself up into the saddle; he sat straight and tall like the battle lord he still was, and led the way down the road followed closely by Asaru, Joshu and myself. Behira seemed happy at being left to drive the wagon, while Maram was very happy lagging behind the rest of us so that he could talk to her.
'Well, Behira,' I overheard him say above the clopping of the horses' hooves, 'it's a lovely day for such a lovely woman to attend her first feast. Ah, how old are you?
Sixteen? Seventeen?'
Behira, holding the reins of the wagon's horses in her strong, rough hands, looked over at me as if she wished that it was I who was lavishing my attention on her. But women terrified me even more than did war. Their passions were like deep, underground rivers flowing with unstoppable force. If I opened myself to a woman's love for only a moment, I thought, I would surely be swept away.
'I'm afraid we have no such women as you in Delu,' Maram went on. 'If we did, I never would have left home.'
I looked away from Behira to concentrate on a stand of oak trees by the side of the road. I sensed that, despite herself, she was quite taken by Maram's flattery. And probably Maram impressed her as well. After Alonia, Delu was the greatest kingdom of Ea, and Maram was Delu's eldest prince.
'Well, you should have let a woman tend your wound,' I heard Behira say to him. I could almost feel her touching the makeshift bandage that my brother had tied around Maram's head. 'Perhaps when we get to the castle I could look at it'
'Would you? Would you?'
'Of course,' she told him. 'The outlander struck you with a mace, didn't he?'.
'Alices, a mace,' Maram said. And then his great, booming voice softened with the seductiveness of recounting his feats. 'I hope you re not alarmed by what happened in the woods today. It was quite a little battle, but of course we prevailed. I had the honor of being in a position to help Val at the critical moment'
According to Maram, not only had he scared off the first assassin and weakened the second, but he had willingly taken a wound to his head in order to save my life.
When he caught me smiling at the embellishments of his story – I didn't want to think of his braggadocio as mere lies – he shot me a quick, wounded look as if to say,
'Love is difficult, my friend and wooing a woman calls for any weapon.'
Perhaps it did, I thought, but I didn't want to watch him bnng down this particular quarry. Even as he began speaking of his father's bejeweled palaces and vast estates in far-off Delu, I nudged Altaru forward so that I might take part in other conversations. 'Val,', Asaru said to nil as I pulled alongside him, 'Lord Harsha has agreed that no one should know about all this until we've had a chance to speak with the king.'
I was silent as I looked off at the rolling fields of Lord Harsha's neighbors. Then I said, 'And Master Juwain?'
'Yes. Speak with him while he attends your wound, but no one else,' Asaru said. 'All right?'
'All right,' I said.
We gave voice then to questions for which we had no answers: Who were these strange men who had shot poisoned arrows at us? Assassins sent by the Ishkans or some vengeful duke or king? How had they crossed the heavily guarded passes into Mesh? How had they picked up our trail and then stalked us so silently through the forest?
And why, I wondered above all else, did they want to kill me?
With this thought came the certainty that it had been my death they had sought and not Asaru's. Again I felt the wrongness that I had sensed earlier in the woods. It seemed not to emanate from any one direction but rather pervaded the sweet-smelling air itself. All about us were the familiar colors of my father's kingdom: the white granite farm houses; the greenness of fields rich with oats, rye and barley; the purple mountains of Mesh that soared into the deep blue sky. And yet all that I looked upon – even the bright red firebirds fluttering about in the trees – seemed darkened as with some indelible taint.
It touched me as well. I felt it as a poison burning in my blood and a coldness that sucked at my soul. As we rode across this beautiful country, -more than once I wanted to call a halt so that I could slip down from my saddle and sleep – either that or sink down into the dark, rain-churned earth and cry out at the terror that had awakened inside me.
And this I might easily have done but for Altaru. Somehow he sensed the hurt of my wounded side and the deeper pain of the death that I had inflicted upon the assassim; somehow he moved with a slow, rhythmic grace thatftemed to flow into me and ease my distress rather than aggravate it The surging of his long muscles and great heart lent me a badly needed strength. The familiar, fermy smell steaming off his body reassured me of the basic goodness of life. I had no need to guide him or even to tejjach his reins, for he knew well enough where we were going: home, to where the setting sun hung above the mountains like agolden cup overflowing with light. So it was that finally came upon my father's castle. This great heap of stone stood atop a hill which was one of several 'steps' forming the lower slope of Telshar. The right branch of the Kurash River cut around the base of this hill, separating the castle from the buildings and streets of Silvassu itself. At least in the spring, the river was a natural moat of raging, icy, brown waters; the defensive advantages of such a site must have been obvious to tny ancestors who had entered the Valley of Swans so long ago.
As I looked out at the castle's soaring white towers, I couldn't help remembering the story of the first Shavashar, who was the great-grandson of Elahad himself. It had been he who had led the Valari into the Morning Mountains at the beginning of the Lost Ages. This was in the time after the Hundred Year March when the small Valari tribe had wandered across all of Ea on a futile quest to recover the golden cup that Aryu had stolen. Shavashar had set the stones of the first Elahad castle and had begun the warrior tradition of the Valari, for it was told that the first Valari to come to Ea – like all the Star People -were warriors of the spirit only. It was Shavashar who forged my people into warriors of the sword. It was he who had foretold that the Valari would one day have to fight 'whole armies and all the demons of hell' to regain the Lightstone.
And so we had. Thousands of years later, in the year 2,292 of the Age of the Sword
– every child older than five knew this date – the Valari had united under Aramesh's banner and defeated Morjin at the Battle of Sarburn. Aramesh had wrested the Lightstone from Morjin's very hands and brought this priceless cup back to the security of my family's castle. For a long time it had resided there, acting as a beacon that drew pilgrims from across all of Ea. These were the great years of Mesh, during which time Silvassu had grown out into the valley to become a great city.
