We all crowded close to Liljana to get a better look at the stone. Kane's eyes shone with a deep light and for a moment seemed as blue as the sea.
'I didn't know you had the power of mindspeaking,' he said to Liljana as he looked at her strangely. 'It's very rare these days, eh?'
'I didn't know myself,' Liljana told him. 'I've never been good at much more than cooking and sniffing out poisons.'
She spoke with modesty, and there was little pride in her bearing. Yet something in her quiet composure gave me to suspect that finding the blue figurine and speaking with the dolphins had confirmed a secret sense she had of herself.
'Well,' Maram called out to her, 'what did the Sea People say, then? Did they tell of the Lightstone? Is it here?'
He looked farther down the beach at the shells piled up against a jutting black rock.
He looked at the driftwood, at the cliffs, and his face was lit up with hope.
'No, they know nothing of the Lightstone,' Liljana said. They don't even understand what such a thing might be.'
'Ah, I hardly understand myself,' Maram said. 'But surely if they knew about your gelstei, they would have known about the Lightstone.'
'You're thinking like a man,' she said to him. 'But the Sea People don't think like we do.'
'Then they can't help us, can they?'
'Don't you give up so easily, my dear,' she scolded him. 'The Sea People are kind creatures, and they like puzzles as much as play. They've called others of their kind to come and talk with me.'
'Other dolphins?'
'I don't know,' she said. 'They called them the Old Ones.'
We looked out away from the land where the dolphins still swam in lazy circles around each other. Now the sun had disappeared into the ocean, and the blueness had left the water as if suddenly sucked away. Long, dark waves moved upon the darker deeps as the light slowly bled from the horizon. In the dusky sea, the dolphins waited, as did we. We stood on the windy beach looking out at the edge of the world where the evening's first stars blazed out of the immense, blue-black sky.
They cast their silver rays upon the onstreaming waters and the great, gray shapes rising up from them. There, in the cold ocean, in that strange time that is neither day nor night, six immense whales suddenly broke the surface and blew their spray high into the air. Master Juwain, who knew about such things, named their kind as the Mysticeti. But I thought of them as Liljana did, and called them simply the Old Ones.
For a while, they spoke with one another in their long, mournful songs that were more like moans than music. Their great voices seemed to still the whole world. And then, as Liljana again pressed the blue gelstei against her head, they too fell silent.
The stars filled the heavens and slowly turned above the shimmering sea.
This time, Liljana did not open her eyes. She stood nearly motionless on the shell-strewn beach. If not for the slow rise and fall of her breath, we would have thought that she had turned to stone.
'Master Juwain,' Maram said softly after some minutes had passed, 'what shall we do?'
'Do? What is there to do but wait?' Master Juwain said. Then he sighed and told him,
'I'm afraid the blestei are dangerous stones. I've always believed that the knowledge to use them has long been lost.'
But this was not good enough for Atara. She came up to Liljana and brushed the wind-whipped hair away from her face.
'We shouldn't just leave her like this,' she said, nodding at me. 'Horses can stand all night, but not a woman. Val, will you help me?'
I was afraid to touch Liljana just then, but together Atara and I, with Maram's help, managed to sit her down against a large rock feeing the sea. Atara joined her there on the sand. She sat holding Liljana's free hand while Liljana continued holding the gelstei tightly to her head.
'Now we can wait,' Atara said. She looked out at the starlit spherethat was the world.
And wait we did. At first, none of us thought that Liljana would sit there entranced all night. We kept looking for some sign that she might open her eyes or the whales grow tired and swim away. But as a yellow half-moon rose in the east and the hours passed, we resigned ourselves to watching over Liljana for as long as it took. Maram got a fire out of some driftwood that he piled up nearby while Master Juwain managed to make us a meal of steamed clams and hotcakes. It was midnight by the time Alphanderry and Kane washed the dishes by the water's edge, and still Liljana did not move.
'I'm afraid for her,' Maram said to me as the fire burned lower. It, cast its flickering light over Liljana's stricken face. 'You met minds with Morjin in your dreams, and it nearly drove you mad. What must it be like to speak this way with a whale?'
'Here, now,' Master Juwain said crabbily. He knelt in front of Lilljana testing the pulse in her wrist.' I've told you a hundred times not to name the Lord of Lies. And to name him in the same breath as the Old Ones – well that is madness.'
He went on to say that the Sea People had never been known to make war or take their vengeance upon men, not even when men put their harpoons into them. Indeed the Sea People, through many long ages, had often rescued shipwrecked sailors from drowning, swimming up beneath them so that they could breathe and taking them toward land.
'That is true,' Kane said in a faraway voice. 'I've seen it myself.'
I thought about this as I sat on the cool sand and watched the great whales floating on the luminous surface of the sea. How was it I wondered, that the Sea People had forsworn war where men had not? Had the Galadin sent them from the stars before even Elahad and Aryu and the stealing of the Lightstone? What would it be like to talk to such beings who obeyed the Law of the One so faithfully?
I waited there on the dark beach for Liljana to look at me and answer these questions. The wind blew across the water, from what source no one knew. The waves continued pounding against the shore like the beating of a vast and immortal heart. And the stars rose and fell into the blackness beyond the world and made me wonder if they were really distant suns or some kind of light-giving crystals created every night anew. It was nearly dawn when Liljana opened her eyes and looked at us.
As if saying goodbye, the whales sang their unfathomable songs and struck the water with their great tails. Then, along with the dolphins, they dove into the sea and swam away.
'Well,' Master Juwain said, as he knelt near Liljana, 'did you under-stand them? What did they tell you?'
But Atara, still sitting by Liljana, held up her hand protectively and said, 'Give her a moment, please.'
Liljana slowly stood up and walked back and forth along the water's edge. And then she turned and said, 'They told me many things.'
It was impossible for her to recount all that had passed between her and the Old Ones in their hours of conversation together. Nor, it seemed, did she wish to. She liked keeping secrets to herself almost as much as she delighted in bestowing upon others her cooking and her care. But she did admit that the Sea People were very doubtful of men.
'They said we were free,' she told us. 'They said that we were free but didn't know it.
And not knowing this, that we weren't. They said we made chains – this is my word – out of our harpoons- and ships and swords, and everything else. They said that wanting to master the world, we are made slaves of it. And so thinking ourselves cursed, we are. A cursed people bring death to themselves, and to the world. And worse, we bring forgetfulness of who we really are.'
She grew silent as the ocean sent its waves breaking against the shore. And then Master Juwain said, 'They must hate us very much.'
'No, my dear, it is just the opposite,' she said. 'Once, in the Age of the Mother, there was a great love between our kinds. They gave us their songs and we gave them ours. But at the end of the age, the Aryans came. Their wars destroyed all that. They hunted down all the sisters who could speak mind to mind to oppose them. Then they gathered up the blue gelstei and cast them into the sea.'
The Aryans, of course, had brought their swords to Tria – and the Age of Swords to all of Ea. They had prepared the way for the rise of Morjin, who hated the Sea People because he could find no way to make them
