The Lightstone: The Silver Sword by David Zindell

Author:David Zindell [David Zindell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007387724
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

11

And so we went into Sakai. It was the work of the rest of the day to fight our way over the nearest pass in this towering front range. We had a bad time of it. Atara slipped on an ice-glazed rock and nearly broke her leg. The horses suffered grievously in the thin air, panting and sweating until their fur froze in the cold. We put blankets over them to ease their shivering, but it didn’t seem to help very much. When the wind rose to a screaming howl as we crested the pass, whipping up flurries of snow, it seemed that our great, white coats didn’t help us much, either.

‘I’m cold, I’m tired,’ Maram complained as he drove himself into the wind and pulled at Iolo’s reins. To either side of us were towers of rock and clouds of snow; beneath the powder at our feet was a mat of old snow made hard as ice by a season of melting and refreezing. ‘In fact, I’m very cold,’ Maram called out into the bitter air. ‘I’m so cold that I’m … frozen! Oh, my Lord, my fingers are frozen! I can’t feel them!’

I hastened to his side and helped him pull off the mittens that Audhumla had knitted him. The tips of his fingers were hard and white. I placed them between my hands and blew on them to warm them. Then Master Juwain came over to take a look.

‘I was afraid of this,’ Master Juwain said, gently pressing his knotty fingers against Maram’s.

Dread cut through Maram like a shark’s fin breaking cold waters. He said, ‘Is there anything you can do? Never to touch a woman again, never to feel –’

‘I think,’ Master Juwain said, ‘we can save the arm.’

He winked as he said this, and his obvious care and confidence reassured Maram somewhat. He told me to keep working on Maram’s fingers until I had completely thawed them; he told Maram to keep his hands in his pockets close to his body until we made camp that night and he could heal Maram’s savaged flesh with his varistei.

‘All right,’ Maram said. ‘But if this is Sakai, I’ve had enough of it already.’

So had I. So, I thought, had all of us – except perhaps Ymiru, who consented to take Iolo’s reins and lead the descent down into the valley that his map had showed. Here, in this windy groove in the earth tens of miles long, we found a few stunted dead trees that provided us wood for a fire. There was a little grass for the horses, too, and water that ran down its center in a little brown stream. The valley seemed too high to shelter much life beyond some marmots and a few rock goats. Blessedly, we seemed the only people to have set foot here for a thousand years.

Our camp that night was a cold one. Master Juwain, his green crystal in hand, accomplished the minor miracle of fully restoring Maram to himself.

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