David Zindell - The Lightstone

And with that, I touched my heels to Altaru's sides and rode out of the trees. I pressed him to a gallop; it was a measure of his immense strength that he quickly achieved this gait driving his hooves into the ground that sloped upward before us. I felt the great muscles of his rump bunching and pushing us into the air. He wheezed and snorted, and I felt his lust for battle. The hill-men had now drawn closer to the warrior, who stood waiting for them with nothing more than a saber and a little leather shield. His ten executioners, with their painted faces and bodies, advanced as a single mass, clumped foolishly close together. Their leader blew his bloody horn again and again to give them courage; they struck their weapons against their wooden shields as they screamed out obscenities and threatened fiendish tortures. This din must have drowned out the sound of Altaru pounding toward them, for they didn't see me until the last moment. But the warrior, looking downhill, did. He somehow guessed that I was charging toward the hill-men and not him; it must have mystified him why a Valari knight would ride to help him. But he left all such wonderings for a later moment. He let out a high-pitched whoop and charged the hill-men even as I lowered my lance and prepared to crash into them.

Just then, however, one of the hill-men turned toward me and let out a cry of dismay.

This alerted the others, who froze wide-eyed in astonishment, not knowing what to do. I might easily have pushed the lance's point through the first man's neck. Altaru's snorting anger, and my own, drove me to do so; the nearness of death touched me with a terrible exhilaration. But then I remembered my vow never to kill anyone again.

And so I raised the lance, and as we swept past the man, I used its steel-shod butt to strike him along the side of his head. He fell stunned to the side of the hill. One of his friends tried to unhorse me with a blow of his mace, but I caught it with my father's shield. Then the infuriated Altaru struck out with his hoof and broke through his shield and shoulder with a sickening crunch. He screamed in agony, even as I bit my lip in an effort not to scream, too.

Through the heat of the battle, I was somehow aware of the Sarni warrior closing with the hill-men's leader and opening his throat with a lightning slash of his saber. I immediately began coughing at the bubbling of blood I felt in my own throat. Then one of the hill-men swung his axe at my back, and only my Godhran forged armor kept it from chopping through my spine. I whirled about in my saddle and struck him in the face with my shield. He stumbled to one knee, and I hesitated for an endless moment as I trembled to spear him with my lance.

And in that moment, the Sarni warrior cut through to him and ruthlessly finished him as well. A mail bevor fastened to the warrior's helm hid most of his face, but I could see his blue eyes flashing like diamonds even as his saber flashed out and struck off the man's head. His prowess of arms and rare fury – and, I supposed, my own wild charge – had badly dispirited the hill-men. When an arrow came whining suddenly out of the trees below us and buried itself in the ground near one of the hill-men to my right, he pointed downhill at Maram standing by a tree with my hunting bow. And then he cried out, 'They'll kill us all – run for your lives!'

In the panic that followed, the Sarni warrior managed to kill one more of the hill-men before his comrades turned their backs to us and fled down the hill toward the east, where a slight rise in the ground provided some cover against Maram's line of fire. I believe that the warrior might have pursued them to slay a few more if I hadn't slumped off my horse just then.

'No, please – no more killing,' I said as I held my hand palm outward and shook my head. I stood by Altaru, and grasped the pommel of his saddle to keep from falling.

'Who are you, Valari?' the warrior called to me.

I looked down the hill where the seven surviving men had disappeared into the woods. I looked at Maram and Master Juwain now making their way up the hill toward us. Except for the heavy breath steaming out of Altaru's huge nostrils, and my own labored breathing, the world had grown suddenly quiet.

'My name is Valashu Elahad,' I gasped out. I felt weak and discon-nected from my body, as if my head had been cut off like the hill-man's and spent spinning into space. I pulled off my helm, then, the better to feel the wind against me. 'And who are you?'

The warrior hesitated a moment as I pressed my hand to my side. I felt the blood soaking through my armor. The battle had reopened the wound there, as well as the deeper wound that would never be healed.

'My name is Atara,' the warrior said, removing his helm as well. 'Atara Manslayer of the Kurmak. Thank you for saving my life.'

I gasped again, but not in pain. 1 stared at the long golden hair flowing down from Atara's head and the soft lines of Atara's golden face. It was now quite clear that Atara was a woman – the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And though our enemies were either dead or dispersed, something inside her still called to me.

'Atara,' I said as if her name were an invocation to the angels who walked the stars,

'you're welcome.'

I suddenly knew that there was much more than a bond of blood between us. I looked into her eyes then, and it was like falling – not; into the nothingness where she had sent the hill-men, but into the sacred fire of two brilliant, blue stars.

For what seemed forever, Atara held this magical connection of our eyes. Then, with what seemed a great effort of will, she looked away and smiled in embarrassment as if she had seen too much of me -or I of her. She said, 'Please excuse me, there's work to be done.' She walked back and forth across the hill, scanning the tree line for sign that the hill-men might attack again. She looked upon Maram and Master Juwain with scant curiosity, then quickly went about the blood-stained slope cutting her arrows out of the bodies of the fallen men. She used her saber with all the precision of Master Juwain probing a wound with a scalpel.

And as she went from man to man, she counted out loud, beginning with the number five. At first, I thought her accounting had something to do with the number of arrows she had fired or recovered. But when she reached the body of the hill-men's leader, whom no arrow had struck, she quietly said, 'Fourteen.' And the headless body of the man she had beheaded was fifteen, whatever that might mean.

And then, as Maram and Master Juwain drew closer, I reflected upon Atara's strange second name: Manslayer. I remembered Ravar once telling of a| group of women warriors of the Sarni called the Manslayer Society. It was said that a few rare women from each tribe practiced at arms and gave up marriage in order to join the fearsome Manslayers. Membership in their Society was almost always for life, for the only way that a Manslayer could be released from her vows was to slay a hundred of her enemies. Atara, in having slain four before she reached this dreadful hill, had already accounted for more men than many Valari knights. And in sending on twelve more, with arrow and sword, she had acomplished a great if terrible feat.

I stood watching her in awe as she cleaned the blood from her arrows and dropped them down into the quiver slung over her back. I thought that she couldn't be much older than I. She was a tall woman and big-boned, like most of her people. And she had their barbaric look. Her leather armor – all black and hardened and studded with steel -covered only her torso. A smoother and more supple pair of leather trousers provided protection for her legs. Her long, lithe arms were naked and burnt brown by the sun. Golden armlets encircled the upper parts of them. A golden torque, inlaid with lapis, encircled her neck. Her hair was like beaten gold, and the ends of it were wrapped with strings of tiny lapis beads. But it was her eyes that kept capturing my gaze; I had never hoped to see eyes like hers in all the world. Like sapphires her eyes were, like blue diamonds or the brightest of lapis.