David Zindell - The Lightstone - The Ninth Kingdom - Part One

‘Altaru, Altaru,’ I whispered to him, ‘what’s the matter?’

There was something, I thought, that he didn’t like about this cut between the mountains. There was something I didn’t like myself. I felt a sudden, deep wrongness entering my bones as from the ground beneath us. It was as if Telemesh, the great king, the grandfather of my grandfathers, in burning off the tissues of the mountain with his firestone, had wounded the land in a way that could never be healed. And now, out of this open wound of fused dirt and blackened rock, it seemed that the earth itself was still screaming in agony. What man or beast, I wondered, would ever be drawn to such a place? Well, perhaps the vultures who batten on the blood of the suffering and dying would feel at home here. And the great Beast who was called the Red Dragon – surely he would find a twisted pleasure in the world’s pain.

He came for me then out of the dark mouth of the fire-scarred Gate. He was, even as Maram feared, a bear. And not merely a Meshian brown bear but one of the rare and very bad-tempered white bears of Ishka. I guessed that he must have wandered through the Gate into Mesh. And now he seemed to guard it, standing up on his stumpy hind legs to a height of ten feet as he sniffed the air and looked straight toward me.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram called out as he tried to steady his horse. ‘Oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’

Now Altaru, seeing the bear at last, began snorting and stomping at the road. I tried to steady him as I said to Maram, ‘Don’t worry, the bear won’t bother us if –’

‘– if we don’t bother him,’ he finished. ‘Well, I hope you’re right, my friend.’

But it seemed that I couldn’t leave the bear alone after all. The wind carried down from the mountain, and I smelled his rank scent which fairly reeked with an illness that I couldn’t identify. I couldn’t help staring at his small, questing eyes as my hand moved almost involuntarily to the hilt of my sword. And all the while, he kept sniffing at me with his wet black nose; I had the strange sense that even though he couldn’t catch my scent, he could smell the kirax in my blood.

And then suddenly, without warning, he fell down onto all fours and charged us.

‘Oh, Lord!’ Maram cried out again. ‘He’s coming – run for your life!’

True to his instincts, he wheeled his horse about and began galloping down the road. I might have done the same if Altaru hadn’t reared just then, throwing back his head and flashing his hooves in challenge at the bear. This move, which I should have anticipated, caught me off guard. For at that moment, as Altaru rose up with a mighty surge of bunching muscles, I was reaching toward my pack horse for my bow and arrows. I was badly unbalanced, and went flying out of my saddle. Tanar, my screaming pack horse, almost trampled me in his panic to get away from the charging bear. If I hadn’t rolled behind Altaru, his wildly flailing hooves would surely have brained me.

‘Val!’ Master Juwain called to me, ‘get up and draw your sword!’

It is astonishing how quickly a bear can cover a hundred yards, particularly when running downhill. I didn’t have time to draw my sword. Even as Master Juwain tried to get control of his own bucking horse and the two pack horses tied behind him, the bear bounded down the snowy slope straight toward us. Tanar, caught between them and the growling bear, screamed in terror, all the while trying to get out of the way. And then the bear closed with him, and I thought for a moment that he might tear open his throat or break his back with a blow from one of his mighty paws. But it seemed that this stout horse was not intended to be the bear’s prey. The bear only rammed him with his shoulder, knocking him aside in his fury to get at me.

‘Val!’ I heard Maram calling me as from far away. ‘Run, now – oh, Lord, oh, Lord!’

The bear would certainly have fallen upon me then if not for Altaru’s courage. As I struggled to stand and regain my breath, the great horse reared again and struck a glancing blow off the bear’s head. His sharp hoof cut open the bear’s eye, which filled with blood. The stunned bear screamed in outrage and swiped at Altaru with his long black claws. He grunted and brayed and shook his sloping white head at me. I smelled his musty white fur and felt the growls rumbling up from deep in his throat. His good eye fixed on mine like a hook; he opened his jaws to rip me open with his long white teeth.

‘Val, I’m coming!’ Maram cried out to the thunder of hooves against stone. ‘I’m coming!’

The bear finally closed with me, locking his jaws onto my shoulder with a crushing force. He snarled and shook his head furiously and tried to pulp me with his deadly paws. And then Maram closed with him. Unbelievably, he had managed to wheel his horse about yet again and urge him forward in a desperate charge at the bear. He had his lance drawn and couched beneath his arm like a knight. But although trained in arms, he was no knight; the point of the lance caught the bear in the shoulder instead of the throat, and the shock of steel and metal pushing into hard flesh unseated Maram and propelled him from his horse. He hit the ground with an ugly slap and whooshing of breath. But for the moment, at least, he had succeeded in fighting the bear off of me.

‘Val,’ Maram croaked out from the blood-spattered road, ‘help me!’

The bear snarled at Maram and moved to rend him with his claws in his determination to get at me. And in that moment, I finally slid my sword free. The long kalama flashed in the uneven light. I swung it with all my might at the bear’s exposed neck. The kalama’s razor edge, hardened in the forges of Godhra, bit through fur, muscle and bone. I gasped to feel the bear’s bright lifeblood spraying out into the air as his great head went rolling down the road into a drift of snow. I fell to the road in the agony of death, and I hardly noticed the bear’s body falling like an avalanche on top of Maram.

‘Val – get this thing off me!’ I heard Maram call out weakly from beneath the mound of fur.

But as always when I had killed an animal, it took me many moments to return to myself. I slowly stood up and rubbed my throbbing shoulder. If not for my armor and the padding beneath it, I thought, the bear would surely have torn off my arm. Master Juwain, having collected and hobbled the frightened horses, came over then and helped me pull Maram free from the bear. He stood there in the driving sleet checking us for wounds.

‘Oh, my Lord, I’m killed!’ Maram called out when he saw the blood drenching his tunic. But it proved only to be the bear’s blood. In truth, he had suffered nothing worse than having the wind knocked out of him.

‘I think you’ll be all right,’ Master Juwain said as he ran his gnarly hands over him.

‘I will? But what about Val? The bear had half his body in his mouth!’

He turned to ask me how I was. I told him, ‘It hurts. But it seems that nothing is broken.’

Maram looked at me with accusation in his still-frightened eyes. ’You told me that the bear would leave us alone. Well, ‘he didn’t, did he?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’

Strange, I thought, that a bear should fall upon three men and six horses with such ferocious and single-minded purpose. I had never heard of a bear, not even a ravenous one, attacking so boldly.

Master Juwain stepped over to the side of the road and examined the bear’s massive head. He looked at his glassy, dark eye and pulled open his jaws to gaze at his teeth.

‘It’s possible that he was maddened with rabies,’ he said. ‘But he doesn’t have the look.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ I agreed, examining him as well.

‘What made him attack us then?’ Maram demanded.