serve him.
'It was the Red Dragon,' she said, 'who first began the hunting of the whales. The Old Ones told me that it had something to do with blood.'
'So,' Kane said in his grimmest voic, 'I've seen whale blood, too bad. It's darker than ours, redder and richer. To the Kallimun priests, it must be like gold.'
'To the Sea People,' Liljana said, 'our hunting of them is as much an abomination as if we hunted and ate our own kind. They think we've fallen mad.'
'Perhaps we have,' I said as I touched the hilt of my broken sword.
'So, it's a dark time,' Kane said. 'A dark age. But there will be others to come.'
Liljana scooped up a handful of wet sand and held it to the side of her face as if to ease a burning there. Then she said, 'The Old Ones spoke of that. They remember a time before we came to Ea. And they've told of a time when we will leave again, too.'
I stood a few yards from the crashing waves as I thought about this. I remembered what Master Juwain had once taught me about the beginning of the Age of Law. In those years, all of Ea had been sickened by the slaughter of the preceding age, and the peoples of all lands wanted only to return to their birthplace in the stars. But in the year 461, the great remembrancer, Sansu Medelin, had recalled the long-forgotten Elahad and his purpose in coming to earth. Sansu said that men and women must follow the Law of the One and create a new civilization before returning to their source. All who listened to him – they called themselves the Followers – fell out violently with the Retumists who wanted immediately to set out on ships and sail the cold seas of space. The War of the Two Stars, a great war lasting a hundred years, had been fought over these two different paths for humankind. Perhaps, I thought, in ages yet to come, other such wars would be fought as well.
'This must be the time,' Master Juwain said, giving voice to the old dream of the Brotherhoods – and many others besides, 'The earth has entered the Golden Band, this we know. Somewhere on Ea, the Maitreya has been born. It may be he who will lead the return to the stars.'
'Return?' Liijana said. 'What have we made here on earth? Ashes. The Red Dragon has burned all that was best of Ea to the ground. Should we return to the Star People bearing ashes in our hands?'
'What would you do, then, sow them into the soil and hope tea gardens to grow?'
'From the ashes of its funeral pyre,' she said, 'the silver swan is reborn. There was a time when we built the Gardens of the Earth and the Temples of Life. And there will be a time when we will build them again.'
'But what of our leaving Ea that your Old Ones have told of?'
'We will leave someday, they say. They say we will leave either in glory or death.
The Old Ones are waiting to see which it will be.'
She paused a moment, then said, 'They are waiting for us – waiung to welcome the Ardun to the higher orders.'
The Ardun, she explained, was her word for what the whales called the earth people.
I turned toward the ocean to see if I could catch one last sight of them. But the waters were empty.
'Well, I'll choose glory, then,' Maram put in. 'It's what man was born for, isn't it?'
'And for what were women born?' Liljana asked. 'Being locked inside their houses while men burn down their cities and spill each other's blood?'
At this Kane came forward and glared at Maram. Then he turned his gaze on Liljana and said, 'Whether the next age is one of darkness or light won't be decided just by men and women. All beings, I think, will play a part in what's to come. Maybe even the whales.'
Now he, too, looked out over the ocean. But aside from the ebbing of the tide, the only movement in that direction came from Flick as he darted and whirled among the sparkling waves.
I said to Liljana, 'Did you ask them about the Lightstone?'
Everyone, even Flick, moved a little closer to Liljana. And she said, 'Of course I did.
I think it amuses them that we're seeking a thing, true gold or not, however powerful it might be.'
'And what do they seek, then?' I asked.
'Just life, my dear. The wisdom to live life as it should be.'
And that, I thought, as I looked at the golden cup that I saw gleaming from the rocks of the cliff, was a truly' a great dream. But how, I wondered, could life be lived at all if a darkness that had no end fell upon the earth like a cold winter night?
'Do the Old Ones know where the Lightstone is?' I asked.
'They know where something is,' she said. 'They told me of a stone that gives much light.'
'Many stones give light,' Master Juwain said. 'Even the glowstones and the lesser gelstei.'
'This is no glowstone, I think,' she said. 'The Old Ones told of an island to the west where there is a great crystal. It's the most powerful gelstei they've ever sensed.'
'Yeas, but is it the Gelstei?'
'I wish I knew,' she said to him.
Master Juwain held out a trembling finger to touch the figurine that Liljana was now staring at. Then he asked, 'Did the Old Ones tell what island this is?'
We all awaited the answer to this question as we held our breaths and looked at Liljana.
'Almost, they did,' she said. 'But their words are not our words. Understanding their names is like trying to grab hold of water.'
'I see,' Master Juwain said. 'But did they say where this island is, then?'
'It must be. west of here – they said the evening sun sets upon it.'
'Very good, but how would anyone get to it? The whales must know.'
'Of course they do,' she said. 'But they don't steer by the stars, as we do. I think they… make pictures of the land and sea with sounds. With their words. When they speak to each other, they see these maps of the world. But I couldn't.'
'You couldn't see anything, then?'
'Only the shape of the island. It looked something like a seahorse.'
At this news, Master Juwain grew silent as his luminous eyes looked out toward the ocean.
Maram, still the student of the Brotherhood despite his failings, said, 'Nedu and Thalu lie to the west of here. And so do ten thousand other islands. Who would ever know if any of them were shaped like a seahorse?'
As it happened, Master Juwain did. The knowledge that he had gained from old books always astonished me. As did his memory.
'When I was a novice,' he told us, 'I read of a little island off Thalu where great flocks of swans gathered each spring. It was called the Island of the Swans, though it was said to be shaped like a seahorse.'
Now I, too, stared out at the ocean to the west. The sun was rising behind me; in the touch of its golden rays upon the world, I saw the Lightstone gleaming beyond the wild blue waters.
'We must go there, then,' I said.
I looked at Atara and Kane; I looked at Maram, Master Juwain, Alphanderry and Liljana. I couldn't hear the words of affirmation they spoke to themselves. But I didn't need a blue gelstei to know that their thoughts were mine.
'But, Val,' Master Juwain said to me, 'the account of this island that I read was old.
There have been great wars since then. The firestones opened up the earth, you know. And the earth took back its own, in cataclysm and in fire. Many of the islands off Nedu and Thalu were blasted into rocks, utterly destroyed. Now the sea covers them.'
'The Old Ones told of this island,' I said. 'So it must still exist.'
A troubled look came over Liljana's face, and I asked her, 'What's wrong?'
'The Old Ones told of this island, yes,' she said. 'But I think they don't see time as we do. For them, what has been still is – and always will be.'
'They sound like scryers,' Maram said, smiling at Atara.
Atara smiled back at him. 'No, a scryer would say what will be always was. And never quite is.'
'And what does this server say?' I asked, smiling at her, too.
'Why, that we should search for this island. Of course we should.'
We decided to celebrate our passage of the Vardaloon and Liljana's great feat of speaking with the Sea People. We filled our cups with brandy, clinked them together, and drank to our resolve to find the Island of the
