David Zindell - The Lightstone

I couldn't tell how old he was: the hair suggested an age of sixty while his sun-beaten features were those of a forty-year-old man. He moved, however, like a much younger warrior. In the highlands of Kaash, I had once seen one of the few snow tigers left in the world; Kane reminded me of that great beast in the power and grace of his muscular body, and most of all, in the fire I sensed blazing inside him. His dark eyes were hot, angry, wild and pained as if he were used to looking upon death and I immediately mistrusted him.

'So, Valashu Elahad,' he said, drawing out the syllables of my name after the Duke had introduced us and we had all sat down. I felt his eyes cutting into the scar on my forehead. 'Of the Meshian Elahads -now there's a name that even I have heard.'

'Heard… where?' I asked, trying to ferret out his homeland.

But he only stared at me with his fathomless eyes as he scowled and the muscles above his tense jaws stood out like blocks of wood.

'So, you've journeyed from Mesh,' he continued. 'The Duke tells me you came through the bog.'

'Yes, we did,' I said, looking at Master Juwain and Maram.

Here the Duke's wife – a harsh-looking woman named Durva -fingered her graying hair and said, 'We've always counted on the bog being impassable. It's bad enough having to guard our border with Adar, to say nothing of the Kurmak raids. But if we have to worry about the Ishkans coming at us from the south, then we might as well just go into the bog ourselves and let the demons devour us.'

I shook my head as I smiled at her. Then I said, ' There aren't any demons in the bog.'

'No?' she asked. 'What is there in the bog?'

'Something worse,' I said.

While the Duke called for our goblets to be filled so that we could begin our rounds of toasting, I told of our passage through the bog. I had to explain, of course, why we had chosen to flee into it, and that led to an account of my duel with Salmelu and my reasons for leaving home. When I had finished my story, everyone sat looking at me quietly.

'Remarkable,' Duke Rezu said, staring at me down the ridge of his sharp nose. 'A sun that never rises, and a moon that vanishes like smoke! If I didn't have to worry about Duke Barwan, I'd be tempted to ride into the bog myself to witness these wonders.'

'Wonders?' Durva said. 'If those are wonders, then the Kurmak are angels sent to deliver us from our other enemies.'

The Duke took a sip of beer and then nodded at me. 'Perhaps your fever gave you visions of things that weren't there.'

'Master Juwain and Maram,' I said, 'didn't suffer from fevers, and they saw what I saw, too.'

At this, Maram took much more than a sip of beer, and nodded his head to affirm what I had said.

'Sleeplessness can cause one to view time strangely,' Duke Reza said He looked at his mother and smiled. 'Isn't. that true?'

'It certainly is,' Helenya said crabbily. 'I haven't slept since Duke Barwan made an alliance with the Ishkans. I can tell you that a single night can well seem like a month.'

The Duke went around the table then, polling both family and guests as to what they thought of my story. Naviru, Chaitra and Arashar were inclined to believe me, while his mother and wife were more skeptical. Yashku, the old minstrel, however, seemed to doubt nothing of what I had said, even as Thaman shook his head and impatiently drummed his fingers against the table. As for Kane, his response surprised me. He took a long pull of his beer; then to Thaman, and the rest of us, he said. 'A man who has never seen a boat won't want to believe that mariners, could cross the sea in one.

So, there are many bad places in the world. And there are many things in Ea left from the War of Stones that we don't understand. This Black Bog is only one of them, eh?'

Duke Rezu agreed that this must be so, then complimented me on finding my way out of the bog. I took a sip of beer from my goblet as I shook my head. I admitted that it had been Altaru, and not I, who had led us to dry ground.

Kane's black eyes seemed to drink in my every word, and he said, 'The powers of animals run very deep. Few people anymore understand just how deep.'

It was a strange thing for him to say, and for a moment no one seemed to know how to respond. Naviru spoke of the nobility of his own horse, and Helenya told of a beloved dog that had once saved her from a robber's knife. Then Duke Rezu finally called for our meal to begin. His grooms brought out of the kitchen many platters of food: fried trout and rabbit stew, goose pie and nut bread and a big salad of spring greens. There were mashed potatoes, too, and three roasted legs of lamb. I found myself very hungry. I piled planks of trout and heaps of potatoes on my plate, and I watched as Maram, too, began to eat with a good appetite. After some moments of clanking dishes and beer being sloshed into our quickly emptied goblets, Maram nudged his elbow into my side. He nodded toward Kane, then whispered, 'I thought that you were the only one who could eat more than I.'

Not wanting to be too obvious, I glanced down the line of the table to see Kane working at his meal with a startling intensity. At the Duke's encouragement, he had taken a whole leg of lamb for himself. Using a dagger that he shook out of the sleeve of his tunic, he sliced off long strips of the rare meat with the skill of a butcher. His motions were so graceful and efficient that his hands and jaws – his whole body – seemed to flow almost languidly. He ate quite neatly, almost fastidiously. But as I watched his long white teeth tear into the meat, I realized that he was devouring it with great speed. And with great relish, too: there was blood on his lips and fire in his eyes. In the time it took me to finish my first fillet of fish, he downed many gobbets of meat, all the while giving sound to murmurs of contentment from deep in his throat

Duke Rezu seemed glad to provide Kane such toothsome joys, and he urged upon him other dishes and poured his beer with his own hand. From comments that he made and the silent trust of their eyes, I understood that Kane had done services for him in the past – what kinds of services I almost didn't want to know. As I watched Kane working with his dagger, I suspected that he could cut human flesh as easily as a lamb's.

'So, you wounded Lord Salmelu and left him alive,' he said to me as he looked up from his plate. He swallowed a huge hunk of lamb, almost without chewing then smiled at me without humor. 'You should never leave enemies behind you, eh?'

I smiled, too, with no humor, and said, 'The world is full of enemies – we can't kill them all.'

At this, the bloodthirsty Durva shook her head and said, 'I wish you had killed Salmelu. And I wish your countrymen would kill the Ishkans, as many as possible.

That would keep them from looking north, wouldn't it?'

'Perhaps,' I said. 'But there must be better ways to discourage the wandering of their eyes.'

Duke Rezu sighed at this and then pointed at the hall's empty tables. 'Even as we take this meal behind the safety of these walls, my eldest son, Ramashar, and my knights are riding the border of Adar. And we can only hope that the Kurmak clans won't mount an invasion this summer. Sad to say, we have enemies all around us.

And so long as we do, the Ishkans will never be discouraged.'

'Enemies we have no lack of,' Durva agreed. Then she looked at her husband in silent accusation. 'And yet you chose this time to let our son go off on a hopeless quest.'

Duke Rezu took a gulp of beer as he regarded his outspoken wife. And then, to me and his other guests, he explained, 'Count Dario and the Alonians passed through Anjo before coming to Mesh. Ianar, my secondborn, has answered the call to the quest even as Sar Valashu and his friends have. He left for Tria ten days ago.'