Atara fell silent, and the clopping of the horses' hooves against the road seemed very loud. I felt in her a great disquiet whether over the plight of the Alonians or something else, it was hard to say. I guessed that she felt ill at ease to be traveling through the lands of the Sarni's ancient enemy. And the closer we drew to Tria, the more apprehensive she became.
Around noon, we came to a village called Sarabrunan. There was little more there than a blacksmith's shop, a few houses and a mill above a swift stream grinding grain into flour. I wouldn't have thought of stopping there any longer than it took to water our horses and buy a few loaves of bread from the villagers. But then I chanced to look upon the hill to the north of the village: it was a low hump of earth topped with a unique rock formation that looked like an old woman's face. Its granite countenance froze me in my tracks and called me to remember.
'Sarabrunan,' I said softly. 'Sarburn – this is the place of the great battle.'
While Kane stared silendy up at the Crone's Hill, as it was called, I found a villager who confirmed that indeed Morjin had met his defeat here. For a small fee, he offered to guide us around the battlefield. 'No, thank you,' I told him. 'We'll find our way ourselves.' So saying, I turned Altaru toward the wheatfields to the north of the village. Maram protested that we had little enough time to reach Tria before the celebration the next night But 1 wouldn't hear his arguments. I looked at him and said, 'This won't take long, but it must be seen.'
We followed the stream straight through the estate of some knight who had no doubt gone off to Tria. No one stopped us. After perrhaps a mile of riding through the new wheat – and through fallow fields and occasional patches of woods – we came to a place where another stream joined the one flowing back toward the village I pointed along these sparkling waters and said, 'This was once called the Sarburn. Here Aramesh led a charge against Morjin's center. He beat back his army across the stream. It's said that it turned red with the blood of the slain.'
We rode up this stream for a half mile and stopped. Five miles to the east, the Crone's Hill rose up overlooking the peaceful countryside. Other than a small knoll half a mile to our west – I remembered that it had once been called the Hill of the Dead – the land in every direction was level as the skin of a drum.
'The armies met in Valte, just after the harvest,' I said. 'The wheat had all been cut, and the chaff still lay in the fields when the battle began.'
I turned to ride toward the knoll, then. I found its slopes overgrown with thick woods where once meadows had been. While the others followed slowly behind me, I dismounted Altaru and walked him through the oak trees. Near one of them, I began rooting about in the bracken as I listened to a crow cawing out from somewhere ahead of me. I searched among old tree roots and the dense undergrowth for twenty yards before I found what I was looking for.
'Look,' I said to the others as I held up a long, flat stone for them to see. It was of white granite and covered with orange and brown splotches of lichen. Two long ages had weathered the stone so that the grooves cut into it were blurred and almost impossible to read.
'It looks like the writing might be ancient Ardik,' Master Juwain said as he traced his finger along one of the smooth letters. 'But I can't make out what it says.'
'It says this,' I told him. 'Here lies a Valari warrior.'
I handed the stone to him; it was the first time in my life I had ever given him a reading lesson.
'Ten thousand Valari fell that day,' I said. 'They were buried on this knoll. Aramesh ordered as many stones cut from a quarry near Tria and brought here to mark this place.'
At this, Maram and Kane began searching the woods for other death stones, and so did I. After half an hour, however, we had found only two more.
'Where are they all? 7 Maram asked. 'There should be thousands of them.'
'Likely the woods have swallowed them up,' Kane said. 'Likely the peasants have taken them to use as foundation stones to build their huts.'
'Have they no respect for the dead, then?' Maram asked.
'They were Valari dead,' I said, opening my hands toward the forest floor. 'And the army they fought was mostly Alonian.'
This was true. In ten terrible years toward the end of the Age of Swords, Morjin had conquered all of Alonia and pressed her peoples into his service. And in the end, he had led them to defeat and death here on this very ground upon which we stood.
And so Aramesh had finally freed the Alonians from their enslavement – but at a great cost. Who could blame them for any bitterness or lack of gratitude they might feel toward the Valari?
For a long while, I stood with my eyes closed listening to the voices that spoke to me. Men might die, I thought but their voices lingered on almost forever: in the rattling of the oak leaves, in the groaning of the swaying trees, in the whisper of the wind. The dead didn't demand vengeance. They made no complaint against death's everlasting cold. They asked only that their sons and grandsons of the farthermost generations not be cut down in the flush of life as they had.
All this time, Atara had remained as quiet as the stone that Master Juwain still held in his rough, old hands. She kept staring at it as if trying to decipher much more than its worn letters.
'You don't like to dwell in the past, do you?' I said to her.
She smiled sadly as she shook her head. She took my arm and pulled me deeper into the woods where we might have a bit of privacy.
'Surely you know that many Sarni warriors died in the battle, too,' she told me. 'But the past is the past. Can I change one moment of it? Truly, I can't. But the future!
It's like a tapestry yet to be woven. And each moment of our lives, a thread. Each beautiful moment everything we do. I have to believe that we can weave a different world than this. Truly, truly, we can.'
It was a strange thing for her to say, and I couldn't help thinking of the spider she had seen weaving its web in her father's house – and of the Grays walking toward us across the moonlit meadow before they actually had. I wondered, then, if she might be gifted with seeing visions of the future. But when I asked her about this, she just laughed in her easy, spirited way as her blue eyes sparkled.
'I'm no server,' she told me. 'Twice, only, I've seen these thing. Surely it's just chance. Or perhaps for a couple of moments, Ashtoreth herself has given her sight directly into my eyes.'
It was neither the time nor the place to dispute what she said. I looked up at the sun, and led her back toward the others.
'It's growing late,' I told them. I bowed my head toward the stone that Maram held in his hand. 'There's nothing more here to see.'
'What should we do with this, then?' Maram asked.
I took the stone from him, and then used my knife to dig a trench i the leaf-covered ground. I planted the stone there; after a little more work with my knife, I set the other two stones back in the earth as well.
'Here lie ten thousand VaJari warriors,' I said, looking about the knoll. 'Now come – there's nothing more we can do for them.'
After that we returned to the road as we had come. We rode in silence for a good few miles, west toward Tria, even as Aramesh had once ridden following his great victory.
That night we found another inn where we took our rest. We set out very early the next morning, and rode hard all that day. It was the seventh of Soldru – a day of clear skies and crisp air, perfect weather for riding. The miles passed quickly as a measure of the hours we spent cantering through the ever-more populated land. But measured by our anticipation of attending King Kiritan's birthday celebration, the time passed very slowly indeed.
Around noon, we entered a hilly country. I would have thought to find there fewer fields, but the Alonians had cut them out of the very land. Except on the steepest slopes, terraces of wheat and barley like green steps ran in contours around the hills.
White stone walls supported each terrace and set one level off from another. It was a beautiful thing to see, and a hint of the Alonians' great skill at building things.
A few hours later, the proof of their genius was laid before us. The Nar Road cut between two of these hills; at the notch, where the road rose to its greatest elevation before winding down into lower and flatter lands, we had our first view of Tria. I could hardly believe what my eyes told me must be true. For there, to the northwest across some miles of gende farmland, great white towers rose high above the highest wall I had ever seen. They sparkled as if covered with diamond dust, catching and scattering the brilliant sunlight, and cut like spears a quarter mile
