And neither did any of my friends. Maram squinted against the squawking seagulls flying above us and said, 'Well, Val, what do we do now?'
I turned to Atara to ask her if she had seen anything in her crystal sphere. But in answer Atara only held out her hands helplessly and shook her head.
Four points there are to the world, and three of these were land while the fourth was ocean. I stood with my back to this gray water as I gazed at the smoking mountain to the north. When I looked in that direction, my heart beat more quickly. And so I began walking toward it.
The others followed close behind me across the beach. Soon its brownish sands gave out onto the wall of forest that had seemed so forbidding from the water. Up close, the tall trees and dense under-growth proved nearly impenetrable. Search though we did for a few hundred yards up and down the beach, we could find no path cuttine through them.
'Are you sure we should go this way?' Maram said, pointing into the forest. 'I don't like the look of it.'
'Come,' I said, taking a step forward. 'It won't be so bad '
'That's what you said of the Vardaloon,' he moaned. Upon remembering our passage of that dark wood, he shuddered as he pulled the hood of his cloak up over his head. 'If I see a single leech, I'm turning back, all right?'
'All right,' I agreed. 'You can camp here on the beach and wait for us to return with the Lightstone.'
The thought of us gaining what he so deeply desired while he sat here on the sand sobered him. He suddenly found his courage, and muttered to me, 'All right, but you go first. If there are leeches here, maybe they'll drop first on you.'
But the forest turned out to hold none of these loathsome worms. Neither were we troubled by ticks, even though the undergrowth near the beach was very thick and brushed continually against us. As for mosquitoes, in all that thick band of woods, we saw only one. This, as it happened, landed right on Maram's fat nose. In his panic to swat it, he forgot the delicacy of this fleshy protuberance. His huge hand nearly flattened it out, causing him to shout in pain. Although the cunning little mosquito escaped this blow, he did manage to bloody himself. It was the funniest thing I had seen since Flick had spun about on Alphanderry's nose.
'Stop laughing at me!' Maram called out as he pressed his hand to his bleeding nose.
'Where's your compassion? Can't you see I'm wounded?'
This 'wound' Master Juwain tended with a few swipes of a doth and a bit of a leaf tucked up into Maram's nostril. And then Kane came over and snapped at Maram,
'Save your valor for our real enemies. We don't know what we're going to find on this island.'
His rebuke reminded me that we knew almost nothing of the Island of the Swans.
Dragons we surely need not fear, but what awaited us deeper in the forest no one could say.
As we started off again, I used my shield to brush the ferns away from my face I gripped my lance in my sword hand. But I saw nothing more threatening than a red fox darting out of our way and a few bumble bees. In truth, I immediately liked the feel of this ancient woodland. Its giant trees, towering far above the carpets of bracken along the forest floor were hung with witch's hair and icicle moss as if arrayed in enchanted garments. Every living thing about us seemed soft and glowing with greenness; even the air smelled sweet and good.
I felt strangely at home here although there were many types of trees and plants that were strange to me Master Juwain put names to a few of them: he pointed out the great cedars with their long strips of red bark and the yew trees and big-leaf maples.
Others he had never seen either. But it turned out that Kane had. He showed us the sword ferns and the horsehair lichens, the lovely pink rhododendrons and the blue hemlocks shagged with old man's beard. Each name he spoke as if reciting that of an old friend. And each name Master luwain dutifully recorded. I thought that I was past of his own private quest to remember the name of each and every thing in the world.
We made slow progress, for there were many new plants to identity, and the ground before us was thick with ferns and rose steeply. There were quite a few downed trees, too, which made the footing treacherous. Kane called some of these moss-covered trunks nurse logs. He said that in rotting apart into bits of crumbling wood, they served as nursery beds for other trees that took seed there. They were also homes to the red-backed voles and other animals we saw scurrying about the forest floor.
'I've never seen a wood so lush,' Maram said as he puffed along behind me. 'If the Lightstone is here, it could be anywhere. How are we to find it? I can't even find my own feet beneath me.'
Liljana came up to him then and reassured him that Sartan Odinan, if he had truly come here, wouldn't have just dropped the Lightstone down into a clump of moss.
'Don't you give up hope just yet, young prince. Perhaps we'll find a cave in one of the mountains we saw.'
These three peaks were now obscured by the wall of vegetation before us. But if we kept a straight line through the giant trees, after perhaps another five miles, we should come upon the slopes of the smoking mountain.
And so we fought our way up across the densely wooded ground that led toward it.
It took us perhaps an hour to cover the first half mile. As there were few enough hours left in the day, and we had only three days until the Snowy Owl sailed again, it seemed that we would be able to explore only the tiniest corner of the island.
And then, after another half mile, the headland we were dtmbing came to a crest. The forest suddenly changed and thinned, and gave way to many more yews, maples and dogwoods. Through the gaps between them, we looked down into the most beautiful valley I had even seen.
'Oh, my lord!' Maram called out. 'There are people here!'
We saw signs of them everywhere. Between the crest on which we stood and the mountains some five miles away were many patches of green that could only be fields. Small stands of trees – they looked like cherry and plum – divided them from each other in darker green lines. Many pastures covered the long slope leading down to the valley's center. There a sparkling blue lake pooled at the base of the three mountains, which curved around its northern shore like a crescent moon. There, too, near the lake's southern shore, surrounded by what seemed to be many streets and colorfully painted houses, stood a great, square building whose white stone caught the sunlight streaming out of a break in the clouds. Liljana said that it reminded her of the ruins of the Temple of Life in Tria.
'We must go there then,' I said. Now my heart was beating very quickly.
'Whoever lives here,' Kane said, squinting as he looked about the valley, 'may not want us here at all. We should be careful, Val.'
I remembered how the Lokilani had stolen upon us and nearly killed us with arrows before rare chance had saved us.
'Careful we'll be, then,' I said. 'But when one walks into the lion's lair, there's only so much care that can be taken.'
And with that, I led off, walking warily through the woods. Atara kept pace with me just to my left; she held an arrow nocked in her bowstring as she looked off through the trees. Master Juwain came next, followed by Liljana and Alphanderry. Behind then, Maram trod carefully down the long slope, all the while fingering his firestone as he started at every squirrel or bird moving about in the branches above him. Kane, as usual, brought up the rear.
After about a half mile, the woods thinned even more and gave out onto a wide pasture on which only a few isolated trees grew. Here the grass was long and lush, and as green as grass could be. Many day's-eyes, with their sunlike yellow centers and long white petals, made a show of themselves, and thousands of dandelions brightened the grass as well. Bees buzzed from flower to flower in their slow but determined way, gathering up nectar peacefully. From somewhere ahead of us, across the lines of rolling and gradually descending ground, came the distant baahing of some sheep. If this walla lion's lair into which we were walking, I thought as I gripped my lance and shield, then surely we were the lions.
Another quarter mile brought us out onto a bowl-like pasture smelling of some sweet blue flowers and sheep droppings. We saw the flock ahead of us, fifty or sixty fat sheep spread out over the soft green grass, their white fleeces gleaming in the sun.
We saw their shepherd, too. And he saw us. The look on his face as we suddenly appeared over a low rise above him was one of utter astonishment. But strangely, his bright, black eyes showed no sign of fear.
' Di nisa palinaii,' he said to us, holding out his hand as if in greeting. ' Di nisa, nisa
