David Zindell - The Lightstone

Doom, Doom, Doom, Doom…

Out on the pasture before the west wall, the enemy's war drums were booming again.

Count Ulanu rode among his badly mauled battalions, screaming out orders and trying to reform his men. Surely, I thought, his heralds must have told him of the breaching of the Sun Gate. And so surely it wouldn't be long before he marched his thousands against the wall again.

'No, no,' Maram called out below me, seeming to read my thoughts, 'I'll burn him with starfire – I will!'

Flushed with the hubris of his recent triumphs, he stood leaning out between two of the battlements' arrow-scarred merlons. He pointed his gelstei toward Count Ulanu five hundred yards from us out on the pasture below. The slanting rays of the sun touched the fire-stone. It began to glow again, hellishly hot, it seemed to me. Ten thousand enemy warriors waited to see if its fire would fall upon them. Then Maram let out a painful cry as the sear of his stone burned his hand. He wailed as his fingers opened against his will, and he let go of it. It fell straight down in front of the wall like a shooting star.

'Oh, my Lord!' Maram cried. 'Oh, my Lord!'

'The firestone!' one of Lord Grayam's knights called out. 'He's dropped the firestone!'

Doom, doom, doom…

The bright crystal, now quickly cooling to a blood red, lay on the green grass of the pasture beneath the wall. A hundred of the Librarians had seen Maram drop it. And ten thousand of the enemy had.

'Maram Marshayk!' Lord Grayam called out next to me. He looked, down from the tower at Maram almost alone beneath us. 'The gelstei! You've got to retrieve the gelstei!'

Maram peered over the crenel at the firestone where it lay among the bodies of fallen warriors thirty feet below him. He sadly shook his head and muttered, 'No, no – not I.'

Far out on the pasture, Count Ulanu had called up his archers who brought their bows to bear on our section of the wall.

'Maram!' I shouted, looking down at him. My eyes picked apart the broken masonry of the tower's stairway to see if there was any way I could climb down to him. There wasn't. 'Maram, you must not let them gain the firestone! Go now!'

'No!' Maram shouted back at me, 'I can't!'

'You can! You must!'

'No, no,' he said angrily. 'How could you ask this of me?'

Behind Count Ulanu, ten of his knights gathered in their horses' reins and turned their shining helms toward us.

'Maram!'

'No! No!'

Several Librarians near Maram chose that moment to haul themselves up over the battlements and climb down the outside of the wall on the ladders that Count Ulanu's men had left there. Arrows killed them. They fell down on top of the heaps of the dying and the dead.

'Maram!' I called out again.

'No, no! I won't go! Are you mad?'

He pulled back behind his merlon just as a rain of arrows clacked against the wall.

Atara, standing next to me on the tower's ledge, looked down at Maram and said,

'He'll never do it.'

'Yes,' I said to her, 'he will.'

Lord Grayam tapped me on the shoulder and pointed across the pasture where a company of cavalry had now gathered two hundred yards behind the archers to charge toward the wall. He started to call for five more of his Librarians, to Maram's left, to go down to the gelstei. But Atara stayed his command. With a strange light in her eyes, she said, 'No, it must be Maram, if it's anyone.'

'Maram!' I called again. ‘The seven brothers and sisters of the earth with the seven -'

'Now we're only six and Alphanderry is dead! And I will be, too, if you ask me to go down there! How can you?'

How could I ask him this, I wondered? And then another thought, as dear and hard as a diamond: How could I not? I knew that the success of the quest depended on his regaining the firestone, as might the fate of Khaisham and much more. The whole world, I sensed, turned upon this moment.

'Maram!' I called out, but there was a silence below me.

It is a terrible thing to lead others in battle. Maram and my com-panions had elected me to lead us on our quest, and lead I must. But since there was no way I could go down to the firestone myself, I had to persuade him to do so. I wanted to give him all my courage then. But all I could do was to show him his own.

'Maram,' I said, though I did not speak with breath and lips. I drew Alkaladur and held it shining in the sun. Strangely, although I had killed many men with it, its silver blade was unstained, for the silustria was so smooth and hard that blood would not cling to it. Maram couldn't help seeing himself in its mirrored brightness. I opened my heart to him then and touched him with the valarda, this gift of the angels. My sword cut deep into him. And there, inside his own heart, he found a sword shimmering as bright as any kalama, if not so keenly honed.

'Damn you!' Maram called out to me. But his eyes told me just the opposite. And then, in a softer voice which I could barely hear, he muttered, 'All right, all right, I'll go!'

He turned to look out at what he must do, the muscles along his great body tensing as he gathered in all his strength. For a moment I thought he was ready to go up and over the wall. And then he quickly pulled him-self back behind the safety of the merlon. And still the drums along the enemy's lines beat almost as loud as my heart: Doom, doom, doom!

'I can't do this,' he said to himself. And then a moment later, 'Oh yes, you can, my friend.'

Again he faced the open crenel, and again he pulled back as he cried out, 'Am I mad?'

And still a third time he rushed to the crenel. He put his hands upon the chipped stone there, gathered in his breath, looked out… and heaved up his breakfast in a bitter spew. And then, to my pride and his own, he pulled himself up and turned facing the wall to let himself down the ladder there.

'Atara!' I cried, sheathing my sword and grabbing up my bow. 'Shoot now! Shoot as you've never shot before!'

Maram was climbing down the ladder with amazing speed as Count Ulanu's knights thundered across the pasture straight toward him. Atara's bow sang out, and so did mine – and those of the Librarians along the wall. Five knights fell from their horses with arrows sticking out of them. But the enemy's archers were now firing off arrows of their own. One of these struck Maram in his rump; he cried out in anger but kept climbing down the ladder. Then he suddenly let go of it and jumped the final five feet to the ground. He scooped up his crystal and leaped back toward the ladder.

Atara's bowstring twanged again, and another knight fell. I killed one, too – as did many of the archers along the wall. Thus the company of knights charging Maram melted beneath this hot rain of arrows. Only one of them managed to close the last twenty yards, slowing his horse as he neared the wall.

'Maram!' I called down to him. 'Behind you!'

Maram, about to be robbed of his treasure and perhaps his life, whipped out his sword even as he turned and ducked beneath the knight's lance. Then he lunged forward and stabbed his sword into the knight's thigh. In its quickness and ferocity, it was a move worthy of Kane.

Just then one of Atara's arrows burned down and took the knight through his throat.

He clung desperately to his horse even as Maram turned to race back up the ladder.

'I'm saved!' he cried out. 'I'm saved!'

But he had spoken too soon. At that moment, an arrow whined through the air and buried itself in the other half of his fat rump. It seemed to push him even more quickly up the ladder. So it was, with feathered shafts sticking out of either of his hindquarters, he reached the top of the wall and heaved himself up over the crenel.

Taking care to jump immediately behind one the merlons, he held up the firestone triumphantly.