I managed to lever myself up and rise from my bed. Then, after nearly knocking over a brazier, I found my way to the center of the tent. I told everyone to stand clear, then I swept out my sword toward the south, west, north and east. It flared even more brightly. A band of silver shimmered before my eyes. It was the only thing in all the world that I could see.
And then, as if lightning flashed out of a dark night, I knew a thing. I called out to my friends: 1 must go there.'
'Go
where?'
Kane said to me.
To the wood,' I told him. 'The place where the Ahrim first found me.'
'There? But why? There's nothing
there
but deer and trees.'
'I don't
why,
Kane. I only know that I must go - and go now!'
At this, Maram came over and grabbed my arm. 'But you can't go
now
! You are beyond being exhausted. Go back to bed, eat a good meal, drink a little brandy, sleep. Who knows? - you might wake up to find the Ahrim gone.'
I shook my head at this. 'No, it will
not
be gone. And there is no time. We will march in two more days, and I cannot lead my men to war if I am blind.'
'At least wait until dawn,' Maram said to me. 'It's nearly pitch black outside.'
I thought of Atara again, and I suddenly sensed at least a small part of what her life had become. And I told Maram, 'For me, it will still be dark in the morning. And it is better that we should go now, that the warriors will not behold their king's blindness.' I issued commands then. It was Abrasax who came up with the story that we would tell everyone to explain my headlong rush out into the black of night: I was to go on a meditation retreat into the mountains in order to seek a vision toward victory. My fiends, along with the Seven and Bemossed, were to help prepare me for a great battle. In its way, it was true enough.
Joshu Kadar led my great stallion up to the very opening of my tent. I tried not to rumble as I mounted him; I sat on Altaru's great back with all the sureness that I could muster. My friends had their horses brought up, too. So did the Abrasax and the rest of the Seven. Although Sar Jonavar and the other Guardians on duty that night must have thought it strange to see us prepare for an outing at such an hour, they said nothing. Neither did Lord Avijan, still awake, who came out of his tent nearby. I was now their king, and they did not like to question me.
I left it to Maram and Kane to lead the way out of our encampment, with me riding close behind them, and the others following me. As we proceeded down the lanes that I could not see, I felt the eyes of many men looking upon me. I prayed that they would not be able to make out the staring emptiness of
my
eyes
- or at least would not wonder at it if they did. I had feared that I would not be able to ride blind. I needn't have. Altaru, always so aware of my every nuance of motion and the fires of my heart, seemed to sense my impairment and that he would have to see his way through the night for both of us. I told him simply to follow Maram and his big brown horse, and this he did. All I had to do was to keep my legs wrapped around his sides and not fall off.
It was strange journeying through the dark. The dark was nothing, in itself, and yet it seemed to envelop me like an evil substance that I could feel with every particle of my being. Every motion and shift in location seemed a threat to my very life. I had to fight my urge, again and again, to call for a halt so that I might find a little peace in stillness. How, I wondered, had Atara ever learned to bear her blindness? How could anyone? Never, not even in the lightless tunnels of Argattha, had I felt so vulnerable. I wanted nothing more than to go back to my bed and lie there in safety beneath the blankets that my mother had once embroidered
- and to remain there for the rest of my life.
We rode at a decent pace for a couple hours back along the route we had taken from Lord Avijan's castle. The sun finally rose and warmed my face. Its light, however, failed to touch my eyes, even slightly. I heard birds' wings beating the air above flower-scented fields, and then the drumming of our horses' hooves as we crossed the bridge over the roaring Arashar River. Twice I dozed, and only the snap of my head dropping down to my chest kept me from falling off Altaru's back. After the third time that I nodded off, in the lake country outside of Hardu, Maram insisted that we stop so that I could rest. I slept for a couple of hours in a fallow wheatfield off the side of the road. It seemed that I had found one good thing, at least in being blind: that I would be able to sleep as easily during full day as I could at night.
And then it came time to go. Kane, who had taken charge of our little expedition, shook me awake and said to me, 'For you it might make no difference, but I want to find my way into these woods of yours while it's still light enough to see.'
Our course took us along the excellent North Road, up through Silvassu and below my family's burned-out castle that I could not see. Despite my sleeping break, we made excellent time, covering a distance of nearly five miles each hour. So it was that early in the afternoon, we turned down the smaller roads leading past many farms to the wood that I sought. The closer that we came to this place where I had fought a bear so many years before, the brighter my sword flared. This length of almost infinitely sharp silustria remained the only thing that I could see.
Alkaladur,
I thought as I pointed it in front of me.
The Sword of Fate.
Although Maram, riding ahead of me, said very little and Kane even less, I knew that we must be close to my wood. We rode through a stand of birch trees that seemed familiar to me. I sensed them from the sound of the wind across their papery bark and by their fermy fragrance. Each kind of tree, I suddenly realized, as with the animals, had its own smell. I knew that the wood of great oaks and elms where Salmelu had fired his poison arrow into me must be close, scarcely a mile from this spot. There, too, the Ahrim had found me and nearly killed me with the even more terrible poison that afflicted my soul.
'We might do best to enter the wood,' I libra Maram say to Kane, 'as we did that day when I went hunting with Val and Asaru. But that would take us past Lord Harsha's farm, and as badly as I would like to see Behira, I don't think it would serve for
her
to see Val in such a state.'
We paused then, and I heard the horses of the Seven and my friends come up behind me. I heard them gathering in together, and I had to suppose that no one had lagged behind. I found myself able to pick up the little boy smell of Daj and Estrella's sweeter scent, as well as the rosewater perfume that Liljana often wore. But I was a man, and not a hound, and whether or not Abrasax and Master Starr and the others had kept pace with us, I could not say - at least until their voices announced their presence.
'I remember that day,' Joshu Kadar said to Maram from out of the darkness behind me. 'I waited for hours at the edge of the wood by Lord Harsha's farm while you went after your deer. But surely we could enter it from a different direction.'
'Surely we could,' I said, pointing my sword to the right of the birch, trees. My sense of direction burned like an arrow through my blood as strong as ever. 'If we go straight that way, we will come to the place where the Ahrim attacked me.'
'Ah,' Maram said to me, 'I still can't see how it will avail us to go back
there.'
'I can't either, Maram,' I told him. 'I am sorry.'
'But what if the Ahrim only draws more power from that dark, damned wood? What if it finds a way to blind the rest of us?'
The radiance sparking off my sword seemed to pull me forward as might the twinkling of the North Star. And I said to Maram, 'I can find my own way from here, if I must. I would ask no one
to
come with me.'
'Ah. well, you might not
ask
it then. But what kind of a man would let his friend go stumbling off blindly through the trees?'
And then Joshu Kadar said to me: 'I have pledged my sword to you, in life and in death. Sire. Please let there be no more talk of you going on alone.'
I smiled at this, then nodded my head to Kane that we should continue.
As we left the road and entered the forest, we moved more slowly, letting the horses pick their way through the bracken. I left it to Kane to determine if we should dismount and walk, should the undergrowth become too thick or the downed, dead trees threaten to break the horses' legs. But all of our horses. I thought, had become used to journeys through the forest. So had I. It seemed to me that I had spent nearly my entire youth walking through this one, or others. I could not see the tall oaks, elms, maples and chestnuts that I knew lay beyond the birch grove. I could not make out their two stories, dark lower down and a lighter green where their leaves bushed up against the sky. Bin I could almost feel their hugeness and the great streams of life that coursed through them. I could smell the humus of the forest floor and bear droppings full of raspberry seeds and many flowers. Bees buzzed from some honeysuckle hanging on a tree nearby, and I heard a woodpecker knocking its needle like hill into the bark of another farther away.
All my senses, save my sight, seemed to have come fully alive here.
As Kane led on, taking his bearings from the direction in which I pointed my sword, I perceived Alkaladur's blade gradually warming to a brighter silver. It almost drove back the blackness clinging to the trees and holding fast about my head.
'I think we are close,' I heard Maram say to Kane, and me. 'It can't be much farther - maybe just past that rotting log.'
Behind me, I heard Liljana murmur soft reassurances to the children, and behind them, Abrasax announced that the trees here exuded a more powerful aura than those of any he had ever encountered. And then, fifty yards farther on, I heard Maram call for a halt.
'There's something strange here,' he said.
I, too, felt what he felt, and perhaps even more strongly. The air suddenly grew denser and moister, and seemed to waver with a charge as if lightning might strike out at any moment.
'Val - I feel sick to my stomach. It's as if a fist is driving into me and keeping me back.'
As it turned it out, when we gathered in close to discuss things, we all felt a deep and silent force working at our bodies and souls like an ocean's tide pushing us back the way we had come.
'It was this way,' Master Juwain said, 'with the Vilds.'
I remembered vividly the three magic woods that we had found in Ea's wild places: in the great tract of the Alonian forest and on the grasslands of the Wendrush and in the burning waste of the Red Desert. It did not seem possible that another Vild could exist in the middle of Mesh, surrounded by farms and men who had hunted all through these woods many thousands of times over thousands of years.
'Kane,' I called out, 'you once said that at least five Vilds still remained somewhere on Ea. Can one of them be
here?'
'Not that I know,' he said with a strange tightness in his voice. 'At least, not that I remember.'
I could almost hear Master Juwain rubbing the back of his bald head in intense cogitation. He suddenly said to me, 'In the three Vilds, we have found great power and great healing. Perhaps, in your forays here, you sensed the presence of a Vild within this wood, even if you wire never aware of it. And have now sought it in your blindness.'
His thoughts, it seemed, almost exactly mirrored my own. 'Let us go on then,' I said. 'Into that very place where it seems the hardest to go.'
The silver streak of my sword pointed us deeper into the woods. More than once, the force pushing at us almost caused me to turn my sword to one side or the other, or lower it altogether. But I kept a hold of it, and we continued moving through the great; silent trees.
'Do you see anything?' I heard Maram say to Kane. 'Does
anyone
see anything? There are only trees here, just as there always weTe, and one tree is like another!'
I smiled at this, for not even two oaks that grew from a pair of acorns would be like each other - to say nothing of the immense oaks of Ea's Vilds that were like no other trees on earth. I felt sure that we must be close to these living giants that grew out of the forest floor. I wondered why no one seemed able to make them out.
'Wait!' Maram shouted. 'There is
something
ahead of us - I can almost see it!'
I, however, could could not. Trapped within a cloud of blackness as I was, I wondered at the nature of sight, itself. How did anyone, or anything, really see? Vision could not merely be a matter of light filling up the eyes with colors and shapes, or else
my
eyes would behold a sea of green all around me. When my grandfather had taken me hunting as a young boy, he had taught me how to look for fire moth caterpillars, whose form and hue exactly matched that of the twigs they hid among. Detecting them, he had told me, required patience, concentration and a training of the mind behind the eye. Had it been this way for Atara, too, searching among millions of possible futures for the one that might hold life for the earth?
True seeing, I thought, could not be possible without a
will
to see. One must learn to look behind surfaces and the usual expectation and habits of the eye and mind. There must be a sensitivity to nuance, a drive toward something higher and deeper, the sudden perceiving of things in a new light
-
and a sort of astonished touching of the real. To see the unseen required a freshness of the mind and a cleanness of the spirit. And seeing, as my grandfather had told me, was much of what the One had created us to do. What did the
One
will us behold? Above all the infinite depths and delights of the One's creation and the immense glory of life that filled even the tiniest of seeds as they sent up through the earth green shoots that fought their way higher and ever higher toward that brilliant and beautiful star in the sky that men had named the . . .