David Zindell - The Lightstone

I didn't need spurs or the silver-handled quirt that the Niuriu's chieftain, Vishakan, had given me to hurry Altaru onward. As always, he sensed my urgency to cover ground quickly, and he led the other horses in moving down the road with all the speed their driving hooves could purchase against the worn paving stones. My fierce warhorse smelled battle ahead of us – and not a battle where he must hide behind walls while the Blues and other warriors came howling over battlements, but a great gathering of warriors in long, shining lines and companies of cavalry thundering over grass toward each other. He was a fearless animal, I thought and I envied him his trust that the future would somehow take care of itself and come ouf? all right.

It grew colder all that day as we rode along; by early afternoon, the sky was growing heavy with clouds. The first snowflakes of the season's first snow began falling a few hours later. Maram, pulling his cloak around himself, offered his opinion that the hand of fate had fallen against us and now we had no hope of reaching the battlefield by the morrow. 'Perhaps they'll call the battle off,' he said as our horses clopped along the road. 'It's no fun fighting through snow.'

I looked at him past the fluffy white crystals sifting slowly down from the sky. I said to him, 'They won't call off the battle, Maram. And so we must ride, even faster, if we can.'

'Ride through the snow, then?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And we'll ride through the night, if we have to.' Although we had suffered much worse cold in the Nagarshath, we had been hoping by this day for the warmth of our home fires and our journey's end. If the storm had proved a heavy one, it might have gone badly for us. As it was, however, it snowed for only a couple of 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.