David Zindell - The Lightstone

They sparkled with a rare spirit, and I thought they were more precious than any gem.

Just then, Maram and Master Juwain rode up to us, and Maram said, 'Oh, my Lord – it really is a woman!'

'A woman, yes,' I said to him. I was instantly jealous of the intense interest he showed in her. 'May I present Atara Manslayer of the Kurmak tribe? And this is Prince Maram Marshayk of Delu.'

I presented Master Juwain as well, and Atara greeted them politely before returning to the bloody work of retrieving her arrows. Both Master Juwain and Maram, as did I, wanted to know how a lone woman had come to be trapped on this hill. But Atara cut short their questions with an imperious shake of her head. She pointed to the top of the hill where her horse lay moaning, and she said, 'Excuse me, but I have one more thing to attend to.'

We followed her up the hill, but when we saw what she intended, we stood off a few yards to give her a bit of privacy. She walked straight up to her horse, a young steppe pony whose belly had been cut open. Much of his insides had spilled out of him and lay steaming on the grass. She sat down on the grass beside him; gently, she lifted his head onto her lap. She began stroking the side of it as she sang out a sad little song and looked into his large dark eye. She stroked his long neck, and then – even as I turned Altaru facing downhill – she drew the edge of her saber across his throat, almost more quickly than I could believe.

For a while Atara sat there on the reddening grass and stared up at the sky. Her struggle between pride of decorum and her grief touched me keenly. And then, at last, she buried her face in her horse's fur and began weeping softly. I blinked as I fought to keep from weeping as well.

After a while, she stood up and came over to us. Her hands and trousers were as bloody as a butcher's but she paid them no heed. She pointed at the bodies of the hill-men and said, 'They accosted me in the woods as I was climbing the hill. They demanded that I pay a toll for crossing their country. Their country, hmmph. I told them all this land belonged to King Kiritan, not them.'

'What else could you do?' Maram asked understandably. 'Who has gold for tolls?'

Here Atara moved back to her horse, where she freed a purse from his saddlebag.

As she weighed it in her hand, it jangled with coins, and she said, 'It's not gold I lack only a willingness to enrich robbers.' 'But they might have killed you!' Maram said.

'Better death than the dishonor of doing business with such men.' Maram stared at her as if this principle were utterly alien to him. 'When the hill-men saw that I wouldn't pay them,' Atara continued, 'they became angry and raised weapons to me.

They told me that they would take from me much more than a toll. ONe of them cut my pony with an axe to keep me from riding away. My pony! On the Wendrush, anyone who intentionally wounds a warrior's pony in battle is staked-out in the grass for the wolves.'

At this, Maram shook his head sadly and muttered, 'Well, better the wolves than the bears.'

It was a measure of Atara's wit – and grace – that she could laugh at this grim humor that she couldn't be expected to appreciate. But laugh she did, showing her straight white teeth as her face widened with a grim smile.

'But why were you even in the hill-men's country?' I asked her. I thought it more than strange that we should meet in the middle of this wilderness. 'And why were you climbing this hill?'

Atara pointed to the hill's ragged, rocky crest above us and said, 'I thought I might be able to see the Nar Road from here.'

We looked at each other in immediate understanding. I admitted that I needed to be in Tria on the seventh day of Soldru to answer King Kiritan's call to find the Lightstone. As did Atara. She told us of her journey then. She said that when word of the great quest had reached the Kurmak tribe, she had bade her people farewell and had ridden north along the western side of the Shoshan Mountains. Only by keeping close to these great peaks had she been able to bypass the Long Wall which ran for four hundred miles across the prairies from the Shoshan to the Blue Mountains. Thus had Alonia protected its rich lands from the Sarni hordes for three long ages. But the Wall couldn't keep out one lone warrior determined to find a way around it. On Citadel Mountain, where the stones of the Wall flowed almost seamlessly into the blue granite of the Shoshan, Atara had discovered a track leading around it through the woods. Her nimble steppe pony had found footing on this rocky track where a larger horse such as Altaru would have broken his legs. And so Alonia, as in times past, had been invaded by the Sarni – if only a single warrior of the Manslayer Society.

'But the Sarni aren't at war with Alonia, are they?' I asked her. 'Why didn't you just pass the Wall through one of its gates?'

Atara looked at rne strangely, and I felt her temper begin to rise. And then she said,

'No, there's no war, not yet. Other warriors, all men, have taken the more direct route along the Poru toward Tria. But the Alonians won't allow one such as I to pass through their gates.'

And so, she said, she had ridden north from the Wall into the hills west of the gap in the Shoshan Mountains. Even as we had ridden onto them, from a different direction.

'I had hoped to cut the road by now,' she said. 'It can't be far.' 'You didn't see it from the top of the hill?' Maram asked worriedly. 'No, I didn't have time to look. But why don't we look now?' Together, we walked the twenty yards to the hill's very top.

As I had thought, the ground dropped off suddenly in a cliff as if a giant axe had chopped off the entire north part of the hill. From the exposed rocks along the line of this fault, we stood to look out. Forty or fifty miles away, the northern spur of the Shoshan Mountains was buried in the clouds. A cottony mist lay over the hill country leading up to them. We couldn't see much more of it than humps of green sticking out above the silvery swirls. But just below us, in a little valley, a blue-gray band of rock cut through the trees. It was wider than any road I had ever seen, and I knew that it must be the ancient Nar Road, which had been built from Tria to Nar before even the Age of Swords.

The question now arose as to what we should do. Maram, of course, favored the familiarity of good paving stones beneath his feet while I might have preferred to keep to the woods. I felt safer beneath the crowns of the great oaks than in proceeding along the line of an open road. But Master Juwain observed that if the hill-men were. bent upon revenge, they could fall upon us anywhere in these hills that they chose. Therefore, he said, we might as well make our way down to the road. Atara agreed with him. And then she added that the hill-men were unlikely to attack us after losing so many men -especially since the arms of a Valari knight had now been added to the power of her great bow.

'But what about my bow?' Maram protested. He held up my hunting bow as if it belonged to him. 'It was my arrow, was it not, that finally frightened the men away?'

Atara looked down the hill to where Maram's arrow still stuck out of the grass. She said, 'Oh, you're right – what a magnificent shot! You probably managed to kill a mole or at least a few earthworms.'

I tried not to smile as Maram's face flushed beet red. And it was good that I didn't, for Atara had her doubts about me as well,

'I've heard that the Valari are great warriors,' she told me.

Yes, I thought, Telemesh and my grandfather were. My father is.

Atara pointed down at the body of the man I had spared. 'It must be hard to be a great warrior who is afraid to kill his enemies.'

Her eyes, which were as beautiful as diamonds, could be as cold and hard as these stones, too. They cut right through me and seemed to strip me naked.