Tur-Solonu, these visions seemed to come at their own calling, not hers. And so she looked up from her gelstei and smiled grimly. 'I see leeches everywhere. But I didn't need to be a scryer to see that.'
'Well, we've got to try to get them off us,' I said to her. I climbed down from Altaru and asked the others to dismount as well. 'Kane, Alphanderry, Master Juwain – please come here.'
While they approached me across the damp bracken, I whipped off my cloak and shook it out. Then, holding one corner of it above my head, I asked my three friends each to take a corner while Maram stood under it to disrobe.
'But, Val, your cloak!' Maram called out. 'You've nothing to cover yourself!'
'Hurry!' I told him. I stood with my eyes closed as a leech dropped down the back of my neck. 'Please hurry, Maram!'
I think that Maram had never moved so quickly to take off his clothes in all his life, not even at the invitation of Behira or other beauties. In a few moments, he stood bare to the waist, his big hairy belly and chest bare to the world. But my cloak, like a shield, protected him from the falling leeches. And so Liljana was able to join him beneath the makeshift canopy to cut away those that had already attached themselves along his sides and back. When she had finished, she rubbed one of Master Juwain's ointments into the half dozen wounds, which oozed copious amounts of blood. That was the strange thing about leech bites, the way they wouldn't easily stop bleeding.
'All right, Atara,' I said, 'you next.'
Maram dressed himself, taking care to pull his cloak so tightly around him that any leech would have to work very hard to force its way inside. Then Atara took his place as Liljana cut at her with her knife. I tried not look upon the splendor of her naked body. And so it went, each of us taking our turns one by one. Even Kane submitted to her ministrations. But he took no more care of the leeches fastened to him than he would twigs fallen into his hair. He dipped his finger into the blood dripping down his deep chest and said to me, 'So – it's as red as yours, eh?'
At last it came my turn. Atara helped me strip off my armor and its underpadding.
While Maram held up my corner of my cloak, Liljana cut more than a dozen leeches from me. Then I quickly dressed, and when I had finished, my friends let my cloak fall around me so that I was well-covered against further assault.
Maram, looking around the forest at the many leeches that still hung from the trees, shook his head and said, This can't be natu-ral.'
'Perhaps it's not,' Kane admitted.
'What do you mean?'
Kane's eyes swept the walls of green around us. 'There's a rumor that once Morjin went into the heart of the Vardaloon. To breed things. Leeches, so we've seen, and mosquitoes and ticks – anything that drinks blood as do his filthy priests. It's said he had a varistei, that he used it in essays of this filthy art.'
'Are you saying that it was he who made these things?' Maram asked.
'No, not made, as the One makes life,' Kane said. 'But made them to be especially numerous and vicious.'
'But why would he do that?'
'Why?' Kane grumbled. 'Because he's the Crucifier, that's why. He's the bloody Red Dragon. It's always been his way to torment living things until they find the darkest angels of their natures. And then to use them in his service.'
Kane's words disturbed us all, and as we set out again, we rode in silence thinking about them. After a while, Kane pulled his horse over toward me, and in a low voice, said, 'You lead well, Valashu Elahad. So, taking off your cloak – that was a noble gesture.'
A noble gesture – well, perhaps, I thought. But I wouldn't get very far on gestures alone or on merely putting up a good face. Soon, after a few more miles of this accursed forest, its creatures would slowly suck away my life and then my spirits would sink as low as Maram's.
That night, for me, was the worst of our journey since the Grays had attacked us.
We made camp on the side of a low hill which I had thought might catch a bit of breeze to drive away the mosquitoes. But at dusk our whining friends came out in full force; there were many leeches here, and as I pulled off Altaru twenty ticks swollen as big as the end of my thumb, his sufferings touched me deeply. Another thing touched me, too. And that was a sense that something was once again hunting me. I thought it could smell my blood, which ran from the leech bites and stained my clothes. It was a dark thing that sought me through the forest, and it had the taste of Morjin.
Chapter 23
For a long time I sat beneath the trees wondering what else the Red Dragon might have made. I said nothing of my speculations to my companions. They teetered on the brink of despair, and any news of yet another bloodthirsty creature pursuing us might push them over. To distract them from their torments – and me from mine – I called on Alphanderry to sing us a song.
'And what shall I play for you?' he said as we all sat between the five smoky fires that Maram had made.
'Something uplifting,' I said. 'Something that will take us far from here.'
He brought out his mandolet and tuned it with his puffy, bitten fingers. And then he began singing of the Cup of Heaven, of how the Galadin had forged it around a distant star long before it had come to Ea. At first, his words were Ardik, which we all knew fairly well. But soon he lapsed in that strange tongue that none of us understood. Its flowing vowels poured out of him like a sweet spring from the earth; its consonants filled the night like the ringing of silver bells. It seemed impossible to grasp with the mind alone, for it changed from moment to moment like the rushing of a moonlit river. It was musical in its very essence, as if it could never be spoken but only sung.
'That was lovely,' Atara said when he had finished.
We all agreed that it was – all of us except Kane, who sat staring at the fire as if he longed for its flames to burn him away.
'But what does it mean?' Maram asked. He watched as Flick did incandescent turns just above Alphanderry's head. 'Where did you learn this language?'
'But I'm still learning it, don't you see?'
'No, I don't,' Maram said, slapping at a mosquito.
Again, Alphanderry smiled, and he said, 'As I sing, if my heart is open, my tongue finds its way around new sounds. And I know the true ones by their taste. Because there is really only one sound and one taste. The more I sing, the sweeter the sounds and the closer I come to. And that is why I seek the Lightstone.'
He went on to say that he believed the golden cup would help him recreate the original language and music of the angels, both Elijin and Galadin. Then would be revealed the true song of the universe and the secret of singing the stars and all of creation into light.
'Someday,' he said, 'I will find it, and then I will make real music.'
The music he made that night, I thought, was very fine as it was, for it poured from him like an elixir that gave both hope and strength. For a while, I paid no mind to the tightening of my belly that told me that something was coming for me through the forest. Instead, I looked off into the dark spaces between the trees. And there, sitting on top of a gnarly root or simply set down into the earth, I saw the Lightstone. It gleamed in many places even more brightly than it had in the Tur-Solonu. It gave me to remember why I had set out on the quest and why, at all costs, it must be found.
Moments of faith, when they fire the soul, seem as if they will last forever. And yet they do not. The morning brought a moist heat along with the mosquitoes, and we set out through the sweltering woods with a heaviness of limb and soul. Even the Vardaloon's many flowers – the snakeroot and ironweed, the baneberry and wild ginger – brought us no cheer. It was hard to stay wrapped in our rough wool cloaks; soon, I thought, we would have to choose between the leeches or heat stroke. I kept smelling the stifling air and looking for any sign that we might be drawing near the ocean. But I knew that we hadn't come as far as I had hoped. The Bay of Whales might still be two days away – or more. And two days, through these leech-infested woods that went on and on mile after mile,
