Diamond Warriors (30 page)

My friends and I then roused ourselves and bathed in a nearby stream. I put on a clean tunic embroidered with the silver swan and seven stars of the Elahads - and of my distant ancestors long before Elahad had come to earth. We breakfasted on some fresh fruit. And then we walked out into the center of the glade to join Aukai and Anouhe.

Abrasax, who had a mind every bit as sharp and curious as Master Juwain's, asked Aukai, 'Will the Elijin come here into this place as we did into the Forest?'

'She will come into the Forest as you did,' Aukai told him. 'But into what part of it, not even the Immortal Ones can know. And so, most likely, we will have to wait for Ondin to walk here.'

And so wait we did. While the trees around us brightened with whole flocks of birds and uncountable numbers of Timpum, we looked for the great Elijin to appear. The summer sun, sometimes yellow and sometimes red, rose above the crowns of the trees. The glade filled with a warm and vivid light.

And then, from out of the east, I saw a white form moving against the woods' colors of silver, gold and green. Ondin, I knew this must be, a women who was also something more - and yet she walked toward us with an animal grace that hinted of great power. Then she stepped closer, and I thought rather of a waterfall flowing across smooth rocks and sparkling in the sun. By the time she entered the glade so that I could look upon her in all her glory, she seemed more like the sun itself: brilliant, beautiful and beaming out all the hope and warmth of life.

She carried herself perfectly straight, though perfectly naturally and without obvious effort. She wore nothing more than a white gown, which covered her tall, lithe body from neck to knee. Her long hair, black as jet, fell down past her shoulders. Her aquiline nose seemed to split the sun's rays and scatter this radiance across her face so that her ivory skin gleamed. I could not say that in the loveliness and symmetry of her features she was more beautiful than the most beautiful of Valari women: Vareva or my mother, for instance. But in Ondin gathered a power and grace that seemed otherworldly in its perfection. It stunned my eyes and caused me to stare at her in wonder.

As Ondin drew up close to us, Aukai took charge of making the presentations. Then Ondin spoke to each of us in turn, pronouncing our names in her rich, ringing voice as if to honor us. I could not keep myself from staring at her, for I felt sure that I had seen her before, if only in my dreams.

'Grandmaster Abrasax,' she said, smiling at him. 'I have hoped my path would cross yours.'

She seemed even wiser than this wisest of men. I could not guess her age: she might have been thirty years old - or thirty thousand.

'Alphanderry - famed minstrel,' she said, addressing the sparkling form of my old companion as if he were a real man. And then, more mysteriously: 'You have come so far, and have only a little farther to go.'

Then she turned to Kane. After gazing at him deeply, she uttered a single name that seemed to echo through the glade and the vast, open spaces of time: 'Kalkin.'

Kane, his black eyes blazing, clamped his hand to his sword's hilt as he suddenly thundered at her: 'Do not call me by that name!'

'I call you as you
are,'
she told him in a voice that rang out sweet but sure, 'and not as you wish you could cease to be.'

I had never known anyone or anything able to intimidate Kane. But as Ondin stared back at him with eyes every bit as black and brilliant as his own, I felt a strange fear come alive within him. It seemed that he could not bear to look upon her. And so he stared down at his hard, clenched hand as if in disappointment and dread.

Then Abrasax, trying to be kind, said to Kane, 'Bright she is, indeed, but no more so than you. In truth -'

'Say no more!' Kane snarled at him. 'I won't hear it, do you understand?'

Abrasax bowed his head to Kane, then looked at him as if he
did
understand my savage friend's most terrible wounds.

Ondin did not press matters with Kane - but neither did she let his dark mood gloom her. She finally turned to me, and her smile was like a honey tea warming my heart. And she said to me, 'Valashu Elahad, ni al'Adar - you have changed.'

I stood still gazing at the marvel of her, as did everyone else. Abrasax, I thought, the Brotherhood's Master Reader, might have spoken of the perfect progression of the fires that whirled within each of Ondin's chakras, the colors of each ingathering and then strengthening each other so as to cast a brilliant aura about her being. I however, had no such talent. Even so, I could not help sensing her splendor, for it seemed at once both numinous and utterly real.

'You speak,' I said to her, 'as if you had seen me before - and not in a scryer's visions.'

I wondered how Ondin - and Aukai - seemed to know so much about me and the world of Ea beyond this Vild.

'But we
have
met bofore!' Ondin said to me,

'Where, then? In the dreamworld?'

'No, here. In this very place. When you were seven years old.'

I stared at her as if she had told me that I really had wings and could fly.

'You do not remember, I know,' she said. 'But it is time that you
should
remember.'

She nodded at Anouhe, who now held a wooden cup full of a bright green liquor that might have been the juice of crushed grass. Anouhe gave the cup to Ondin, who inhaled its fragrance and then handed it to me.

'There is no danger in this,' Ondin told me, 'but only remembrance. Drink, Valashu, and know what has truly been.'

Because I wanted to solve the mystery that Ondin had presented me - and because I trusted her - I put the cup to my lips and took a drink. The liquor tasted at once sweet and peppery, cool and bitter. I could not guess from what fruits or plants Anouhe had brewed it.

Upon swallowing, the liquor streaked like fire straight down through my insides. Before it even reached my belly, it seemed, I
did
feel myself flying, as if a catapult had flung me straight up into the sky's empty space. There came a moment of blinding brilliance. And then, as if a fireflower had opened inside my mind fully formed, I remembered what Ondin had hinted to me:

On my seventh birthday, my father had taken me on my first hunting trip into the woods behind Lord Harsha's farm. Two of my brothers, Asaru and Yarashan, had come with us. They had each put arrows into the same deer at the same moment, and then argued over whose had killed it. And as they stood beneath the elms disputing with each other and my father judged their deeds, I had wandered off. I made my way deeper into the woods, drawn by the call of a scarlet tanager - and something else. I remembered thinking that I could walk to the end of the woods and right up the slopes of Mount Eluru to the very stars. Instead, I had somehow walked straight into the Forest. Now, as I looked around the glade at the silvery astor trees and the glowing stellulars, I relived my wonder at beholding this magical place for the first time sixteen years before.

'I
did
come here!' I shouted in astonishment. I looked at Aukai. 'You were here! You taught me how to listen to the animals, and call them to me!'

Aukai smiled hugely as he nodded his head and whistled like a wood thrush.

'And you,' I said, turning to Anouhe, 'gave me a drink that you told me would keep me from dying, should I ever take any wounds that became infected.'

She, too, smiled as I pressed my hand to my side where Salmelu's sword had driven through me during our duel. I noticed that Abrasax, Master Virang and Bemossed were looking at me in amazement.

'And you,' I said, bowing my head to Ondin, 'were waiting for me here. You played the flute with me and taught me three songs! You told me that music would quicken my spirit.'

I remembered leaving the Forest and walking away from it holding the flute that Ondin had given me: the very same one that I had years later passed on to Estrella. This beautiful girl smiled as she now took out this slip of wood and held it up to the shining sun.

'And it has quickened it,' Ondin said to me. 'As much else has, too. You have such a bright spirit, Valashu Elahad. So bright, and so strong.'

'But why did I forget this place?' I asked her. 'And forget
you?'

Ondin looked down at the Cup of Remembrance, as she called it, that I still held in my hand. Then she nodded at Anouhe to take it and told me, 'Because I asked this wise one to give you to drink from the Cup of Oblivion.'

'But why?'

'Because,' Ondin explained, 'in looking upon the glory of this place, you did not want to return to
your
woods. And since you
had
to return, we took away your memory of the Forest so that it would not haunt you.'

'But
why
did I have to go back? I might have remained here and spent my whole life making music with the birds.'

Ondin smiled at this. 'You said the same thing when you were seven years old. But you had to go back to Ea to fulfill your fate, which you would have found impossible to do if you lamented the darkness all around you while always longing for the brightness of the Forest.'

'My fate, you say? But what do you know of that? Can not a man make his own fate?'

I noticed Ondin looking at the sword I had strapped over my shoulder, and I felt its weight pulling at me.

'Your fate,' she told me, 'was to fight - and fight you have done.'

'Yes, I have. But always with an eye toward the end of war, when I would have time to make music again.'

'And that time is coming. When war shall end, or all things shall end. And you have your part to play in that.'

'Yes, but
what
part?' I asked her.

I was never to know if Ondin possessed the gift of looking into others' minds as Liljana could. But she seemed able to look into my soul - and those of Abrasax, Master Virang, Bemossed and Kane. She seemed to sense, all in a moment, the nature of the argument that divided us as to how Morjin must be fought.

'You are Valashu ni al'Adar,' she told me, 'descendant of the Lightstone's first Guardian and one of the first Valari. And the Valari were once warriors of the spirit, and must be again.'

'Others have told me that,' I said to her. I drew out my bright blade from its sheath. 'But fate, it seems, has also called me to be a warrior of the sword.'

'So it seems,' she said, smiling at me. 'But not just
any
sword.'

I pressed my hand to my chest and said, 'That which I hold inside myself is not enough to defeat Morjin as people wish.'

'No? Do you
know
that, Valashu? I have come here to tell you that the true Alkaladur has not yet been fully forged. And so no one has ever wielded it as it should be wielded.'

I thought of the great War of the Stone that the angels (and many Valari) had fought across the heavens for a million years, and one of its most terrible moments: when the Amshahs, led by Kalkin, had tried to touch Angra Mainyu with a splendid light and return him to the Law of the One. In an amphitheater outside of Tria, one of the ghostly Urudjin had recited these verses to us, and more recently, Kane:

In ruth the warrior went to war,

A host of angels in his train:

Ten thousand Amshahs, all who swore

To heal the Dark One's bitter pain.

With Kalkin, splendid Solajin

And Varkoth, Set and Ashtoreth –

The greatest of the Galadin

Went forth to vanquish fear of death.

And Urukin and Baradin,

In all their pity, pomp and pride:

The brightest of the Elijin

In many thousands fought and died.

Their gift, valarda, opened them:

Into their hearts a fell hate poured;

This turned the warrior's stratagem

For none could wield the sacred sword.

Alkaladur
!
Alkaladur
!

The Brightest Blade, the Sword that Shone,

Which men have named the Opener,

Was meant for one and one alone.

Kane, the very warrior spoken of in the verse, stared at Ondin with bottomless black eyes full of pain. And I said to her, 'If the tale is a true one, then all the angels, even Ashtoreth herself, could not together forge what you call the true Alkaladur. Angra Mainyu turned the force of their souls back upon them! And slew all those who could be slain! And so why should you speak to me as if I can have anything to do with Alkaladur's forging, much less wielding it as you desire?'

She watched the sun's light play on my sword's silver blade, and she said to me, 'But you must know that you must have
something to
do with its forging. As all who follow the Law must. There will come a day when the Amshahs, in our millions, will again strike the soul force into Angra Mainyu's heart.'

As she spoke these words, Kane ground his jaws together, and his whole being seemed to writhe with fire.

'But you failed once,' I said to Ondin. 'Why, then? Why couldn't the ancient Maitreyas heal Angra Mainyu?'

'That is not know,' Ondin told us sadly. 'But the great Maitreya, who will lead all worlds into the Age of Light, has yet to come forth.'

At this Estrella's large deep eyes seemed to catch up Bemossed's brightness and give it back a hundredfold. Then everyone else looked at him, too.

And Ondin, feeling the weight of our expectation, said to us, 'I am the messenger of Ashtoreth, but not even she knows who this great Maitreya will be. All we can say is that the Maitreya has not yet quickened and come into his power.'

Her words did not distress Bemossed. He smiled at Ondin as if at least one person existed who understood him.

I thought again of the verse's refrain:

Alkaladur
!
Alkaladur
!

The Brightest Blade, the Sword that Shone,

Which men have named the Opener.

Was meant for one and one alone.