The Lightstone: The Ninth Kingdom: Part One

I felt Maram’s fear quivering inside my own heart; there, I felt something deeper compelling me to move. It warmed my frozen limbs, and filled my hands with a terrible strength. Suddenly, I found the skill at arms that my father had taught me. With a speed that astonished me, I plucked out the arrow caught in my jacket and fit it to my bowstring.

But now Maram and the assassin whirled about each other as Maram slashed at the air with his dagger and the assassin tried to brain him with an evil-looking mace. I couldn’t shoot lest I hit Maram, so I cast down my bow and started running through the trees toward them. Twigs broke beneath me; even through my boots, rocks bruised my feet. I kept my eyes fixed on the assassin even as he drew back his mace and swung it at Maram’s head.

‘No!’ I cried out.

It was a miracle, I believe, that Maram got his arm up just in time to deflect the full force of the blow. But the mace’s heavy iron head glanced off the side of his skull, knocking him to the ground. The assassin would surely have finished him then if I hadn’t charged him with my dagger drawn and flashing with every lightning bolt that lit the forest.

Valashu Elahad.

The assassin stood back from Maram’s stunned and bleeding form and watched me approach. He was a huge man, thicker even than Maram, though none of his bulk appeared to be fat. His hair was a dirty, tangled, coppery mass, and the skin of his face, pale and pocked with scars, glistened with grease. He was breathing hard with his bristly lips pulled back to reveal huge lower canines that looked more like a boar’s tusks than they did teeth. He regarded me hatefully with small bloodshot eyes full of intelligence and cruelty.

And then, with frightening speed, he charged at me. I hadn’t wanted to close with a man wielding a mace, but before I could check myself, we crashed into each other. I barely managed to catch his arm as his huge hand closed around my arm and twisted savagely to force me to drop my knife. We struggled this way, hands clutching each other’s arms, as we thrashed about the forest floor trying to free our weapons.

Valashu.

I pulled and shifted and raged against this monster of a man trying to kill me. His vast bulk, like a mountain of spasming muscles, surrounded me and almost crushed me under. He grunted like a wild boar, and I smelled his stinking sweat. I felt his fingernails like fire tearing my forearm open. Suddenly I crashed against a tree. My face scraped along its rough bark, shredding off the skin. In my mouth, I tasted the iron-red tang of blood. And all the while, he kept trying to smash the mace against my head.

‘Valashu,’ I heard my father whisper, ‘you must get away or he’ll kill you.’

Somehow then, I managed to turn the point of my knife into his arm. A dark bloom of blood instantly soaked through his dirty woolens. It was a only small wound, but it weakened him enough that I was able to break free. With the force of sudden hate, he pulled back from me at almost the same moment and shook his mace at me as he cried out, ‘Damn you Elahads!’

He clenched the fist of his wounded arm and grimaced at the hurt of it. It hurt me, too. The nerves in my arm felt outraged, stunned. There was no way, I knew, that I could fight another human being and not leave myself open to the violence and pain I inflicted on him.

But I wasn’t wounded in my body, and so I was able take up a good stance and keep a distance between us. I tried to clear my mind and let my will to life run through me like a cleansing river. My father had taught me to fight this way. It was he, the stern king, who had insisted that I train with every possible combination of weapons, even one so unlikely as a mace against a knife. Words and whispers of encouragement began sounding inside me; bits of strategy came to me unbidden. I found myself falling into motions drilled into my limbs by hours of exhausting practice beneath my father’s grim, black eyes. It was vital, I remembered, that I keep outside of the killing arc of the mace, longer than my knife by nearly two feet. Its massive head was of iron cast into the shape of a coiled dragon and rusted red. One good blow from it would crush my skull and send me forever into the land of night.

‘Damn you all!’

The assassin swore as he swung the mace at my head and pressed me back. Big drops of rain splatted against my forehead, nearly blinding me; I was afraid that I would stumble over a tree root or branch and fall helpless beneath this onslaught. The best strategy, I knew, called for me to feint and maneuver and wait for the mace’s momentum to throw my opponent off balance and create an opening. But the assassin was a powerful man, able to check his blow and aim a new one at me almost before the head of the mace swept past me. He came straight at me in full fury, spitting and swearing and swinging his terrible mace.

He might have killed me there in the pouring rain. He had the superior weapon and the skill. But I had skill, too, and something else.

I have said that my talent for feeling what others feel can be a curse. But it is also truly a gift, like a great, shimmering double-edged sword. Even now, as I felt the pounding red pain of his wounded arm, I sensed precisely how he would move almost before his muscles tensed and the mace burned past me.

It wasn’t really like reading his mind. He wanted to frighten me with a feint toward my knife hand, and I felt the fear of it as an icy tingling in my fingers before he even moved; a desire to smash out my eyes formed up inside him, and I felt this sickening emotion as a blinding red pain in my own eyes. He whirled about me now, faster and faster, trying to crush me with his mace. And with each of his movements, I moved too, anticipating him by a breath. It was as if we were locked together hand to hand and eye to eye, dancing a dance of death together in the quickness of iron and steel that flashed like the storm’s brilliant lightning.

And then the assassin aimed a tremendous blow at my face, and the force of it carried the mace whooshing through the air. Just then his foot slipped against a sodden tree root, and I had the opening that I had been waiting for. But I couldn’t take it; I froze up with fear as I had at the Battle of Red Mountain. Instantly, the assassin recovered his balance, and swung the mace back toward my chest. It was a weak blow, but it caught me on the muscle there with a sickening crunch that nearly staved in my ribs. It took all my strength to jump away from him and not let myself fall to the ground screaming in pain.

Val, help me!’ Maram screamed from the glistening bracken deeper in the trees.

I found a moment to watch as he struggled to rise grunting and groaning to his feet. And then I realized that the scream had never left his lips but was only forming up like thunder inside him. As it was inside of me.

‘Val, Val.’

The assassin’s lust to kill was like a black, ravenous, twisted thing. He fairly ached to bash open my brains. I suddenly knew that if I let him do this, he would gleefully finish off Maram. And then lie in wait for Asaru’s return.

‘No, no,’ I cried out, ‘never!’

The assassin came at me again. Hail began to fall, and little pieces of ice pinged off the mace’s iron head. I slipped and skidded over an exposed, muddy expanse of the forest floor; the assassin quickly took advantage of my clumsiness, aiming a vicious blow at me that nearly took off my face. Despite the rain’s bitter cold, I could feel him sweating as he growled and gasped and damned me to a death without end.

I knew that I had to find my courage and close with him, now, before I slipped again. But how could I ever kill him? He might be a swine of a man, a terrible man, evil – but he was still a man. Perhaps he had a woman somewhere who loved him; perhaps he had a child. But certainly he himself was a child of the One, and therefore a spark of the infinite glowed inside him. Who was I to put it out? Who was I to look into his tormented eyes and steal the light?

There is something called the joy of battle. Women don’t like to know about this; most men would rather forget it. Combat with another man this way in the dark woods was truly dirty, ugly, awful – but there was a terrible beauty about it, too. For fighting for life brings one closer to life. I remembered, then, my father telling me that I had been born to fight. All of us were. As the assassin raged at me with his dragon-headed mace, a great surge of life welled up inside me. My hands and heart and every part of me knew that it was good to feel my blood rushing like a river in flood, that it was a miracle simply to be able to draw in one more breath.

‘Asaru,’ I whispered.

Some deep part of me must have realized that this wild joy was really just a love of life. And love of the finest creations of life, such as my brother, Asaru, and even Maram. I felt this beautiful force flowing into me like sunlight; I opened myself to it utterly. In moments, it filled my whole being with a terrible strength.

Maram cried out in pain from the bloody wound on his head. The assassin glanced at him as his pulse leaped in anticipation of an easy kill. Something broke inside me then. My heart swelled with a sudden fury that I feared almost more than any other thing. I found that secret place where love and hate, life and death, were as one. This time, when the mace swept past me, I rushed the assassin. I stepped in close enough to feel the heat steaming off his massive body. I got my arm up to block the return arc of his mace as he snorted in anger and spat into my face. I smelled his fear, with my nostrils as well as with a finer sense. And then I plunged my dagger into the soft spot above his big, hard belly; I angled it upward so that it pierced his heart.

‘Maram!’ I screamed out. ‘Asaru!’

The pain of the assassin’s death was like nothing I had ever felt before. It was like lightning striking through my eyes into my spine, like a mace as big as a tree crushing in my chest. As the assassin gasped and spasmed and crumpled to the sodden earth, I fell on top of him. I coughed and gasped for breath; I screamed and raged and wept, all at once. A river of blood spurted out of the wound where I had put my knife. But an entire ocean flowed out of me.

Val – are you hurt?’ I heard Maram’s voice boom like thunder as from far away. I felt him hovering over me as he placed his hand on my shoulder and shook me gently. ‘Come on now, get up – you killed him.’

But the assassin wasn’t quite dead. Even in the violence of the pouring rain, I felt his last breath burn against my face. I watched the light die from his eyes. And only then came the darkness.

‘Come on, Val. Here, let me help you.’

But I couldn’t move. I was only dimly aware of Maram grunting and puffing as he rolled me off the assassin’s body. Maram’s frightened face suddenly seemed to thin and grow as insubstantial as smoke. The colors faded from the forest; the blood seeping from his wounded head wasn’t red at all but a dark gray. Everything grew darker then. A terrible cold, centered in my heart, began spreading through my body. It was worse than being caught in a blizzard in one of the mountain passes, worse even than plunging through Lake Waskaw’s broken ice into freezing waters. It was a cosmic cold: vast, empty, indifferent; it was the cold that brings on the neverness of night and the nothingness of death. And I was utterly open to it.

It was as I lay in this half-alive state that Asaru finally returned. He must have sprinted when he saw me – and the dead assassin – stretched out on the forest floor, for he was panting to catch his breath when he reached my side. He knelt over me, and I felt his warm, hard hand pressing gently against my throat as he tested my pulse. To Maram he said, The other one … escaped. They had horses waiting. What happened here?’

Maram quickly explained how I had frozen up after the first assassin’s arrow had stuck in my jacket; his voice swelled with pride as he told of how he had charged the second assassin.

‘Ah, Lord Asaru,’ he said, ‘you should have seen me! A Valari warrior couldn’t have done any better. I don’t think it’s too much of an exaggeration to say that I saved Val’s life.’

Thank you,’ Asaru said dryly. ‘It seems that Val also saved yours.’

He looked down at me and smiled grimly. He said, Val, what’s wrong – why can’t you move?’

‘It’s cold,’ I whispered, looking into the blackness of his eyes. ‘So cold.’

With much grumbling from Maram, they lifted me and carried me over beneath a great elm tree. Maram lay down his cloak and helped Asaru prop me up against the tree’s trunk. Then Asaru ran back through the woods to retrieve our bows that we had cast down. He brought back as well the arrow that the first assassin had shot at me.

This is bad,’ he said, looking at the black arrow. In the flashes of lightning, he scanned the woods to the north, east, south and west. There may be more of them,’ he told us.

‘No,’ I whispered. To be open to death is to be open to life. The hateful presence that I had sensed in the woods that day was now gone. Already, the rain was washing the air dean. There are no more.’

Asaru peered at the arrow and said, They almost killed me. I felt this pass through my hair.’

I looked at Asaru’s long black hair blowing about his shoulders, but I could only gasp silently in pain.

‘Let’s get your shirt off,’ he said. It was one of his rules, I knew, that wounds must be tended as soon as possible.

In a moment they had carefully removed my jacket and shirt. It must have been cold, with the wind whipping raindrops against my suddenly exposed flesh. But all I could feel was a deeper cold that sucked me down into death.

Asaru touched the livid bruise that the assassin’s mace had left on my chest. His fingers gently probed my ribs. ‘You’re lucky – it seems that nothing is broken.’