David Zindell - The Lightstone

We were all quiet when we set out the next morning. Our breath steamed out into the bitter air, and our boots crunched against the cold, squeaking snow. It was enough, I thought, to avoid trpping and tumbling down some steep slope, enough merely to keep placing one foot ahead of the other and continue plowing through Sakai's frozen wastes. But I couldn't help thinking of Angra Mainyu, this great, fallen Galadin whose dreadful face could darken whole worlds. I knew that somehow, through Morjin, he, too, sensed my defiance and trembled to crush me in his wrath.

And so for two days we worked our way closer to Argattha. Our approach led us through a wild, broken country where we lost the thread of our road. Finally, following Ymiru's map and the lines of the land, we came to a great gorge running for forty miles to either side of us, north and south. It was hundreds of feet wide and very deep: standing at the lip of it, we looked down and saw a little river winding its way past layers of rock far below. Ymiru had hoped to find a bridge here, but it seemed that the only way across the gorge was to fly.

'Is there no way down it?' Atara asked, looking over the edge. I think she knew there wasn't. A very agile man, perhaps, might be able to climb down such a forbidding wall but no horse ever could.

Liljana looked up and down the gorge, at the Mountains framing it, and then at the map which Ymiru held out before him. She said, 'It would be hard work to walk around this. I should think it would add a hundred miles to our journey.'

'That's too far,' Master Juwain said. 'The horses would starve.'

As we stood with the horses on the narrow shelf of land above the gorge, I felt Altaru's belly rumbling with hunger – as I did my own. We had run out of oats for the horses and had little enough food for ourselves.

'Perhaps the bridge you seek is farther up the gorge,' Liljana said to Ymiru. Then she turned to look at the rent earth toward the right and said, 'Or perhaps that way.'

'I had thought the bridge would be right here,' Ymiru said despond ently.

He walked away from us, along the ragged lip of the gorge, looking down at the rocks below for any sign of a fallen bridge. Then he sat down on a rock and bent his head low as he stared down at the ground in silence.

'So,' Kane said, 'seeking for non-existent bridges up and down this gorge would be as futile as trying to walk around it.'

'Then we will have to turn back,' Maram said.

'Turn back?' Kane said to him. 'To what?'

After a while, I gave Altaru's reins to Atara, and went over to Ymiru where he sat fifty yards away, now staring down into the gorge as if he were contemplating throwing himself into it.

'I was sure the bridge would be here,' he said, not even bothering to look up at me.

'Now I've put us in a hrorrible spot.'

'You can't blame yourself,' I said, sitting down beside him. 'And you can't give up hope, either.'

'But, Val, what are we to do?' he asked as he pointed at the gorge. 'Walk across this on air? You might as well put your hropes into old wives' legends.'

Something sparked in me as he said this. And so I asked him, 'What legends are these?'

He finally looked up at me and said, There are stories told that the ancients built invisible bridges. But no one believes them.'

'Perhaps you should believe them,' I said, gazing at the sun-filled spaces of the gorge. 'What else is there to do?'

'Nothing,' he said. 'There be nothing to do.'

'Are you sure?'

He smiled at me sadly and said, 'That be what I love about you, Val – you never give up hrope.'

'That's because there always is hope.'

'In you, perhaps, but not in me.'

Inside him, I sensed, was a whole, dark, turbid ocean of self doubt and despair. But there, too, was the sacred spark: the ineffable flame that could never be quenched so long as life was in life. And in Ymiru this flame burned much brighter than it did in other men. How was it that he, who could feel so much, couldn't feel this?

'Ymiru,' I said, grasping his huge hand. It was much warmer than mine, and yet as my heart opened to him, I felt a knife-like heat passing from me into him. 'You've led us this far. Now take us the rest of the way toward Argattha or else the work of your father and all your grandfathers will have been in vain.'

His ice-blue eyes suddenly lit up as he squeezed my hand almost hard enough to break it. He looked across the gorge and said, 'But Val, even if there were such a bridge here, how would I ever find it?'

'Your people are builders,' I said to him. 'If you were to build a bridge across this ditch, where would you put it?' A fire seemed to flare inside him then. He gathered up a great handful of stones and leapt to his feet. His hard eyes darted this way and that measuring distances, assessing the lay of the great, columnar buttresses of rock along the length of the gorge. He began walking along it with great strides and great vigor. Here and there, he paused a moment to hurl a stone far out into the gorge and watch it plunge through the air down towards the river below.

'What did you say to him?' Master Juwain asked as Ymiru came up to the place where he and the others waited with the horses. 'What is he doing?'

Ymiru cast another stone arcing out into space, and Maram said, 'No doubt he's calculating how long it will take us to fall to the bottom if we're foolish enough to try to climb down this wall. Ah, we're not that foolish, are we, Val?'

At that moment, one of Ymiru's stones made a tinking sound and seemed to bounce up into the air before continuing its fall into the gorge. As Maram watched dumbfounded – along with Kane and the others – Ymiru threw another stone slightly to the right and achieved the same effect. Then he flung all the remaining stones in his hand out into space, and many of them bounced and skittered along what could only be the unseen span of one of the bridges told of in the Ymanir's old wives' tales.

'I suppose I'll have to pay more attention to old wives,' Maram said after Ymiru had explained things to him. 'Invisible bridges indeed! I suppose it's made of frozen air?'

Ymiru, looking out at the gorge with a happy smile, said, 'Our Elders have long sought the making of a crystal they called glisse. It be as invisible as air. This bridge, I'm sure, be made of it.'

It seemed a miracle that the gorge should be spanned by a crystalline substance that no one could see. All that remained was for us to cross over it.

'Perhaps,' Master Juwain suggested to Maram, 'you should lead the way.'

' I? I? Are you mad, sir?'

'But didn't you tell us, after your little escapade at Duke Rezu's castle, that you're unafraid of heights?'

'Ah, well, I was speaking of the heights of love, not this.'

Ymiru stepped forward and laid his hand on Maram's shoulder. He said, 'Don't worry, little man. I think you're going to love walking on air.'

As we made ready to cross the gorge, we found that the horses would not step very close to the edge of it; surely, I knew, they would balk at setting their hooves down on seemingly empty space. And so in the end, we had to blindfold them. We found some strips of cloth and bound them over their eyes.

'You'd do better to blindfold me,' Maram muttered as he fixed the cloth around Iolo. 'We're not really going to step out onto this glisse, are we, Val?'

'We are,' I said, 'unless you first discover a way to fly.' Ymiru, who was the only one of us freed from the burden of leading a horse, borrowed Kane's bow so that he could feel the way ahead of him. He stepped to the very edge of the gorge. Slowly, he brought the tip of the bow down through the air until it touched the invisible bridge. And then, as we all held our breaths, he stepped out into space onto it. 'It be true!' he shouted. 'The old tales be true!' In all my life, I had seen nothing stranger than this great, furry man seeming to stand on nothing but air. And now it was our turn to join him there.