hours. And a couple of hours after that the clouds began breaking up. By dusk, with the air growing dark and icy, the sky was beginning to fill with stars. 'It seems,' I said to Maram, 'that fate may yet offer us a chance.'
'Yes, to throw ourselves onto the Ishkan's spears,' he muttered. He wiped the frost from his mustache, then said to me, 'Do you remember that day in Lord Harsha's fields? He said that the next time the Ishkans and Meshians lined up for battle, you'd be there at the front of your army.'
Master Juwain, making a rare joke, looked at Maram from on top of his tired horse and said, 'I didn't know Mesh produced such scryers. 'Perhaps we should have taken him with us on our journey as well.'
This suggestion produced nothing but groans from Maram. He turned toward me and said, 'Lord Harsha is too old to go off to war, isn't he? Now there's a man I don't want to meet decked out for battle.'
'We're likely to meet only the dead on the battlefield,' I said to him, 'if we don't hurry.'
That evening we ate our supper in our saddles: a cold meal of cheese, dried cherries and battle biscuits that nearly broke our teeth. We rode far into the cold night. The many stars and the bright half-moon opened up the black sky and gave enough light so that we could follow the whitened road as it wound like a strand of shimmering silver along the mountains toward the east. It would have been safest for us to cleave to the Kel Road and take it all the way to the keep by the gorge of the lower Raaswash.
There the road from Mir, by which my father's army had marched, came up from the south and followed the river for seven miles as it flowed northeast toward the Upper Raaswash. But for us, coming from the west, this was not the quickest way toward the battlefield. I knew of another road that led straight from the Kel Road down to the Upper Raaswash. 'Are you asking us to cut through the mountains on a snowy night?' Maram asked incredulously when I told him of my plan. 'Have you lost your wits?'
'Is this wise?' Master Juwain asked as we stopped the horses for a quick rest. 'Your shortcut will save only a few miles.'
I looked up at the stars where the Swan constellation was practically flying across the sky. I said, 'It may save an hour of our journey – and the difference between life and death.'
'Very well,' he said, steeling himself for the last leg of a hard ride. 'Ah, I think I've lost my wits,' Maram said, 'following you this far.'
'Come on,' I said, smiling at him. 'We've dared much worse than this.'
The path that gave upon the Kel Road, when we finally found it, proved to be not nearly as bad as Maram had feared. True, it was unpaved and quite steep, leading up and over the side of a small mountain. But there were few rocks to turn the horses' hooves, and tile path was quite clear. It took us through a swath of evergreens dusted in white and gleaming in the moonlight. Soon enough the road began its descent through some elms and oaks mostly bare of leaves; by the time the sky ahead of us began growing lighter, the quiet woods through which we rode were covered with only a couple of inches of snow.
I guessed that the confluence of the two Raaswash rivers lay only four or five miles from here. We rode quickly over ground that gradually fell off toward the northeast, our direction of travel. As we lost elevation, the trees around us showed many more leaves. The rising sun was just beginning to melt the snow from them. The woods around us rang with the patter of falling water, like rain. And from ahead of us came a deeper, more troubling sound: the booming of war drums shaking the air and calling men to battle.
At last we crested a small hill, and through a break in the trees we saw the armies of Ishka and Mesh spread out below us. The clear morning sun cast a great glimmer upon ranks of shields, spears and polished steel helms. The Upper Raaswash was to our left; the Ishkan lines – perhaps twelve thousand men – were drawn up about five hundred yards to the south of it. They ran along the river, from the base of our hill to the Lower Raaswash, which joined the Upper about a mile farther on to the east.
There King Hadaru had anchored his left flank, which were all warriors on foot against these bright waters. He himself had gathered the knights of his cavalry to him on his right flank at the base of our hill. I sensed that Salmelu, Lord Issur and Lord Nadhru were there sitting on top of their snorting and stamping mounts as they awaited the command to charge. I counted nearly seven hundred knights around them, all looking toward the standard of the white bear that fluttered near King Hadaru.
Facing them across the snow-covered ground were the lines of the ten thousand warriors and knights of Mesh. A mile away, by the Lower Raaswash, two hundred Meshian knights on horse were massed to the right of the foot warriors. I knew that Asaru would be there leading them, and perhaps Karshur and one or two of my other brothers as well. Although my father always made good use of terrain, he didn't believe in relying upon rivers, hills or suchlike for protecting his flanks. It gave men, he always said, a false sense of security and weakened their will to fight. And my father's will toward fighting, I knew, was very strong. Having tried to avoid this battle with all his wiles and good sense, now that he had finally taken the field against the lshkans, I pitied any knight or warrior who dared to cross swords with him.
He sat on top of a great chestnut stallion with five hundred knights on their horses at the base of our hill, off toward our right. I couldn't make out his countenance from this distance, but his flapping standard of the swan and stars was clear enough as was the white swan plume that graced his helm. I made out the blazons of the Lords Tomavar, Tanu and Avijan nearby him, and of course, the gold field and blue rose of his seneschal. Lord Lansar Raasharu. Much to Maram's chagrin, Lord Harsha had taken a post just to their right. It seemed that he was not too old for war, after all.
Maram, Master Juwain and I had only a few moments to drink in this splendid and terrible sight before a signal was given and the trumpeters up and down the Meshian lines sounded the attack. Now the drummers ahead of the lines beat out a quicker cadence in a great booming thunder as ten thousand men began marching forward.
Their long, black hair, tied with brighdy colored battle ribbons won in other contests, flowed out from beneath their helms and streamed out behind them.
Around their ankles they wore silver bells which sounded the jangling rhythm of their carefully measured steps. This high-pitched ringing had been known to unnerve whole armies and put them to flight before a single arrow was fired or spear clashed against shield. But our enemy that day were Ishkans, and they sported silver bells of their own, as did all the Valari in battle. And every man on the field, Ishkan or Meshian, warrior or king, was dressed in a suit of the marvelous Valari battle armor: supple black leather encrusted with white diamonds across the chest and back, covering the neck, and gleaming along the arms and legs down to the diamond-studded boots.
The brilliance of so many thousands of men, each sparkling with a covering of thousands of diamonds, dazzled the eye. Who had ever seen so many diamonds displayed in one place? The wealth of the Morning Mountains was spread out on the snowy field below us – and not just her gemstones. For it was men, I thought, and the women who would grieve for them, who were the true treasure of this land.
Warriors such as Asaru, pure of heart and noble-souled, born of the fertilest and finest soil – these were the only diamonds that had true worth. And they mustn't, I knew, be squandered.
'Come on!' I said to Maram and Master Juwain. I urged Altaru forward down the hill.
'It's nearly too late.'
Already, on the battlefield ahead of us through the trees, the archers behind the opposing lines were loosing their arrows. The whine of these hundreds of shafts shivered the air; their points clacked off armor in a cacophony of steel striking stone.
Soon enough, some of these arrows would drive through the chinks between the diamonds and find their way into flesh.
I rode hard for the edge of the woods and the quickly narrowing gap between the two advancing armies. Maram, clinging to his bounding horse, somehow managed to catch up to me. He pointed through the trees off to the right, towards my father's standard and his cavalry. And he gasped out, 'Your lines are that way! What are you trying to do?' 'Stop a battle,' I said.
And with that I drew forth the Lightstone and charged out onto the field. I held it high above my head. The sun filled the cup with its radiance, and it gave back this splendor a thousandfold. A sudden blaze poured out of it, drenching the warriors of both armies in a brilliant golden sheen. More than twenty thousand pairs of eyes turned my way. With Maram to my right, and Master Juwain to my left, we rode straight past the lines of men to either side of us as down a road. Thus did Lord Harsha's prediction come true as we found ourselves in the middle of the battlefield in front of both advancing armies.
'Hold!' I cried out to the warriors around me as Altaru galloped through the snow.
