David Zindell - The Lightstone

I teetered on top of the snow, sweating and trembling too, stunned to find myself suddenly standing alone. There was a terrible pressure inside me that made me want to scream.

'Don't you see?' she said to me as her hands covered her belly. Her eyes, fixed on the emptiness of the night, suddenly found mine. 'Our son, our beautiful son – I can't see him!'

I didn't know what she meant; I didn't want to know what she meant.

'I'm sorry,' she said, taking my hands in hers. 'But this can't be, not yet. Maybe not ever.'

The wind falling down from the sky, chilled my inflamed body. The stars in the blackness above me told me that I must be patient.

'I know that there is hope,' I said to her. 'I know that there is a way.'

She drew herself up to her full height and gazed at me as from far away. Then she asked me. 'And how do you know this?'

'Because,' I said, 'I love you.'

It was a foolish thing to say. What did love have to do with overcoming the world's evil and making things come out all right? My wild words were sheer foolishness, and we both knew this But it made her weep all the same.

'If there is a way,' she said, pressing her hand against the side of her face, 'you'll have to find it. I'm sorry, Val.'

She leaned forward then and kissed me, once, on my lips with great tenderness. And then she turned to walk back toward our camp, leaving me alone beneath the stars.

I didn't sleep the rest of the night – and not because the Lord of Lies sent evil dreams to torment me. The remembrance of the terrible hope that I had seen in Atara's eyes was torment enough. So was the taste of her lips that seemed to linger on mine.

In the morning we made our way down from the saddle between the two mountains into a long, narrow valley. It was a lovely place and heavily wooded, with blue spruce and feather fir and other trees. A sparkling river ran down its center. Its undulating forests hid many birds and animals: bear, marten, elk and deer. Although we were deep in the White Mountains and it was rather cool, the air held none of the bitterness of the high terrain we had just crossed. And so we decided to make tamp by the river and rest that day. The horses' hooves needed tending and so did our sorely worked bodies. Despite our worry about the Frost Giants, Atara went off by herself to hunt, hoping to take a little venison to replace our dwindling stores.

Although we needed the meat badly enough, 1 knew that she mostly just wanted to be alone.

I was not the only one to notice this new inwardness that had come over her. Later that afternoon, as I sat with Maram and Liljana on the rocks by the river washing our clothes, Maram said to me, 'How she looks at you now! How she looks at herself!

What happened between you two last night?'

'That is hard to say,' I told him.

'Well, whatever it is, she's a new woman. Ah, the power of love! As soon as this quest of ours is over, my friend, I'd advise you to marry her.'

And with that he stood up, gathered up his wet clothes and pointed at some dry, high ground above us where he had built up a good fire. 'Well I'm going to take a nap. Please keep an eye out for the Frost Giants. And bears. I don't want to be eaten in my sleep.'

After he had ambled off, I looked at Liljana and said, 'Here we are in the middle of the wildest country on earth and he thinks of marriage.'

Liljana's big breasts swayed beneath her tunic as she beat our soiled garments upon the rocks. She looked up from her work and smiled at me, saying, 'I think you do, too.'

'No,' I said, looking toward the forest to the south where Atara had disappeared,

'this is no time to think of that.'

'With a woman like Atara, how could you think otherwise?'

'No,' I said, 'she's a scryer, and scryers never marry. And she's a warrior who must

– '

'She's a woman,' Liljana said to me as she wrung out one of Master Juwain's small tunics. 'Don't you ever forget that my dear.'

Then she sighed and lowered her voice as if confiding in me a great secret. 'A woman,' she said, 'plays many roles: princess, weaver, mother, warrior, wife. But what she really wishes for, deep in her heart, is to be someone's beloved.'

She looked at me kindly and smiled. Then she, too, gathered up her clothes and left me sitting by the river.

Later that night, over a fine feast of roasted venison, we all sat around the fire discussing the long journey that still lay ahead of us. None of us had forgotten what had happened in the Kul Moroth or in Khaisham. But the meat we devoured filled us with a new life. And something in the gleam of Atara's eyes communicated to us a new hope, as terrible as it might be.

'It's strange,' Maram said, 'that we've come this far and seen no sign of these Frost Giants. Perhaps they don't really exist.'

'Ha!' Kane laughed out, wiping the meat's bloody juices from his chin. 'You might as well hope that bears don't exist.'

'I'd rather meet a bear here than a Frost Giant,' Maram admitted. 'One of the Librarians told me that they use men's skin for their water bags and make a pudding from our blood. And that they grind our bones to make their bread.'

'Perhaps they do – so what? Do you think they're not made of flesh and blood? Do you think steel won't cut them or arrows kill them?'

While Kane and Maram sat debating the terrors of these mysterious creatures, Master Juwain suddenly looked up from the book he was reading. 'If they do exist, then perhaps they make their dwellings only in the higher mountains. Why else would they be called Frost Giants?'

Here he pointed toward the white peaks of the great massif rising up to the east of the valley.

'Well, then,' Maram said, looking about nervously, 'we should keep to the valleys, shouldn't we?'

But, of course, we couldn't do that. The cast of the mountains here was mostly from north to south, with the ridgelines of the peaks and the valleys between them running in those directions. To journey east, as we did, was to have to cut across these great folds in the earth wherever we might find a pass or an unexpected break. And that made a hard journey a nearly impossible one.

The next morning we gathered over a breakfast of venison and porridge to study the lay of this long valley in which we had camped.

We could see no end to it either to the north or south. We had to turn one way or the other, however, for just to the east rose a great jagged wall of peaks that not even a rock goat could have crossed.

'I say we should turn south,' Maram said, looking off into the white haze in that direction. 'That way, it grows warmer, not colder.'

We all looked at Atara, but her eyes held no eagerness to set out in any direction.

She said nothing, staring off toward the sky,

'Perhaps we should go north,' Master Juwain said. 'We wouldn't want to stray too far from the line of the Nagarshath when we come out onto Sakai's plateau.'

'If we go too far north,' Kane said, 'we'll find the country of the Blues.'

'Better they than the Frost Giants,' Maram said.

'I thought you wanted to go south, eh?'

'I don't want to go anywhere,' Maram said. 'Not anywhere but home. Why is it that we have to go to Argattha to find the Lightstone?'

'Because,' I said, 'it must be done, and it is upon us to do it.'

I drew my sword, pointing it east and slightly south as I watched it glow in the cool, clear air. Then I said, 'We've go south.'

And so we did. We packed the horses and rode along the river through the sweet-smelling forest. The trees here were not so high or thick that we couldn't catch glimpses of the great range to the east of us. We rode all that day for twenty miles across gradually ascending ground until we came to a little lake at the bottom of a bowl with mountains all around us. And there, just to the south of these blue waters, was the break in the mountain wall that I had been hoping for. It was only a quarter mile wide and narrowed quickly as its rocky slopes rose toward ridgelines to either side of it But it seemed like a pass, or at least an opening onto other valleys beyond it.