earth like a long line of rafts joined together. And most of it we saw as we drew closer, was eaten with wormholes or rotten. The houses and all the buildings beyond it were made of the same rotting pine so that the whole city reeked of decay and the stench of tar and turpentine.
But the wall at least had a gate and a road leading up to it. We made our way down this dirt track past ragged peasants who ran from us as they cried out and covered their faces. They disappeared into their tiny wooden huts and shut the doors behind them.
'Ah, a friendly people,' Maram said as he rode next to me. 'Perhaps we shouldn't take advantage of their hospitality.'
'But they might be able to help us cross the river,' I told him. 'Besides, we should find out what has frightened them so.'
The peasants' cries had alerted the city's guards, who stood along a walkway behind the low walls looking down at us. They each had long blond hair and tangled blond beards. They wore tattered blue tunics emblazoned with crests showing an eagle clutching two crossed swords in its talons. Their iron helmets were pitted with rust, as were the poor, shortish swords they brandished at us.
'Who are you?' demanded one of these blue-eyed guards that I took to be their captain. 'From where do you come?'
We gave them our names and those of our lands; we told them that we needed help in crossing the Ardellan so that we could continue on our journey. After conferring with his fellows for a moment, the captain looked at us with his icy blue eyes and said, 'We know of Alonia and the Elyssu, but there are no kingdoms called Mesh and Delu that we have ever heard.'
'So, it's a big world,' Kane growled at him as he tossed a little stone against the gate.
'If you'll let us in, we'll tell you more about it'
'The King will decide that,' the guard captain said. 'You'll wait here while he is summoned.'
As if to give more weight to his command, the other guards suddenly produced crossbows and aimed them at us. But the iron of their mechanisms seemed worn away, and I doubted if they would fire.
'What kind of king is it,' Maram whispered to me, 'who is summoned to greet us rather than we to him?'
For a while, as we sat on our horses and listened to the wind rattling across the potato fields surrounding the city, we awaited the answer to this question. And then we heard heavy steps behind the rickety old wall as of boots treading up wooden stairs. An old man suddenly showed his white-haired head and wispy white beard. I saw that he must have once been quite tall but was now stooped with age. He wore a faded purple mantle collared with white ermine that had seen better days. Upon his head was a silver crown that seemed to have been hastily polished in a vain effort to rub the tarnish away. The guard captain presented him as King Vakurun. The King looked down upon us with rheumy blue eyes that held no welcome but a great deal of fear.
'Tell us your names again,' he commanded us in a quavering voice. 'Speak up so that we can hear you.'
Again, we gave our names and waited for the gates to be opened.
'How do we know you are who you say?' he asked us.
'Who else could we be?' I replied.
King Vakurun traded a quick look with his captain, then pointed at the trees beyond the fields. 'Only evil things have ever come out of those woods.'
I smiled at Atara and Alphanderry, then called out, 'Do we look evil to you?'
'That which has slain my people,' he told us as he pointed his old finger at Atara, 'is said sometimes to appear as fair as this maiden.'
He went on to say that his realm had been attacked by a succession of enemies: great black bears deeper in the woods; an invincible knight mounted on a great white horse armored in diamonds; a tribe of warrior women; giant men with hideous faces and white fur; long, leechlike worms as big as whales – and other things.
Now it was my turn to trade looks with Kane and the others. Then I looked up at the King and said, 'It would seem that all these enemies were really one enemy. And he has been slain.'
We told of our passage through the Vardaloon and of Meliadus. We assured him that we had put this monster in the earth, from which he would never rise again. Then we told him about the quest and showed him the medallions that King Kiritan had given us.
'We have heard of King Kiritan,' King Vakurun said. The sunlight off the circles of gold we wore around our necks seemed to dazzle his eyes. 'And we have heard that he sent emissaries to all lands to call knights to Tria, though he never sent anyone to our realm.'
His hand swept out toward the fields around his rotting old town.
'And what realm is that?' I asked him.
'Why, Valdalon,' the King said. 'You're in Valdalon, didn't you know?'
He went on to say that he ruled all the lands from Eanna to the Blue Mountains and between the White Mountains and the sea.
'If you really did slay this Meliadus,' he told us, 'then we owe you a debt that must be repaid.' I looked at the points of his crown and saw that the squares of amethyst there had fallen off two of them. I said, 'We ask only a safe passage through your kingdom and help crossing the river, if you can provide it.'
I admitted that we were on way to Ivalo, where we hoped to find a ship that would take us across the sea to the islands south of Thalu.
'If it's a ship you seek,' the King said, 'then perhaps we can help you cross much more than the river. There are two ships in our harbor, and one of them is due to sail for Ivalo this very day.' This news sent a stir of excitement through us, especially Maram who had dreaded the hard work of chopping down trees to build a raft – to say nothing of riding hundreds of miles to Ivalo. After our various travails, we seemed to have been favored with a stroke of good fortune.
King Vakurun called for the gates to be opened then, and we rode into the city – if this assemblage of miserable houses and muddy streets could so be called. Forty of the King's men immediately surrounded us to act as an escort; none of these
'knights,' however, was mounted. It seemed that the King himself possessed the only horse in the city. He pulled himself on top of this sway-backed old gelding, then rode beside me as we made our way through the streets toward the river.
'We'll have to hurry if we wish to catch this ship,' he told us. 'It might be a long while before another sails for the west.'
With a sad look then, he recounted the story of his people. Many of these lined the streets to witness the unprecedented spectacle we must have provided them. All except the graybeards and crones had the same blond hair and blue eyes as our guards. All looked as if they might have been Atara's distant cousins – which indeed they proved to be.
The Valdalonians, King Vakurun said, were descendants of a great warrior named Tarnaran and his followers, who had set out from Thalu some three hundred years before. Tarnaran and his band of adventurers – these were not the King's words but only my understanding of them – claimed the great Bohimir as their ancestor.
Dreaming as they did of regaining the glory of the ancient Aryans, they sought new lands to conquer. But Tarnaran was no Bohimir, and Thalu was long past its time of greatness. There was to be no sailing of the Thousand Ships or sack of Tria by bloodthirsty savages in this age. Five ships only Tarnaran gathered along the coast of the impoverished Thalu. He led them across the Northern Ocean and into the mouth of the Ardellan River. There they built their first city, and Tarnaran was crowned King of Valdalon.
But it was one thing to claim all the land from Eanna to the Blue Mountains, and quite another to subdue it. King Tarnaran had found it easy enough to cow the tribespeople along the coast into paying him a tribute of fish and furs; the tribes of the deeper forest proved more formidable. As did the forest itself. It took the Valdalonians a hundred years to establish towns farther inland along the Ardellan and its tributaries. Fighting the leeches and mosquitoes and thick walls of vegetation was bad enough. But as they tried to extend their power even further through their realm, they were assaulted and killed by the succession of enemies that King Vakurun had told of earlier.
'You can't begin to understand the terror this Meliadus caused my people,' King Vakurun told us. 'if it truly was this beast-man who slayed them.'
Meliadus, the King said, had slain much more than the Valdalonians. Over the second century of their rule, the tribes of the deeper woods began dying, followed by those of the coast. With no one left to pay them tribute,
