Black Jade (111 page)

'Perhaps you should take that back,' Liljana said to me, pointing at the medallion. 'If anyone chances this way, he will likely claim it.'

'No, let it remain,' I said. 'Berkuar is entitled to keep it.' 'Then perhaps we should bury him, and let it lie with him.' I considered this as I watched Bemossed step up to Berkuar and

touch his hand to Berkuar's stony fingers. I found myself gazing

at Bemossed a little too intently.

And he said to me, 'I cannot bring back the dead, Valashu.' 'I know that,' I told him. I rapped my knuckles against the trunk of a maple as I added, 'And I know it would be best to leave Berkuar just as he is, looking upon these beautiful trees. It is a kind of life, isn't it?'

After that we journeyed on into the more heavily wooded eastern reaches of the gap, and I thought more and more about life - and thus about death. Although we hadn't yet drawn very close to that dark, diseased part of the Acadian forest called the Skadarak, I knew that we could not avoid it. Our reasons for setting a course close to it remained as before. It was reason that told me we could survive it, as we had once, and yet as I contemplated going anywhere near the Skadarak's blackened and twisted trees, my disquiet built into a howling, belly-shaking dread.

So it was with my friends. In our descent of the mountains down into Acadu's cold, gray woods, Daj fell as quiet as Estrella, while Atara, Liljana and Master Juwain rode along lost in a terrible silence. And then, with our horses' hooves crunching over dead leaves, Maram finally looked at Master Juwain and said, 'At the Avari's hadrah, when you tried to use your crystal, you only proved that Morjin still has a hold on it. It must be, then, that he still has a hold on the Black Jade, and so on us.'

Master Juwain could usually summon a well-thought response to almost any statement. This time, however, he only looked at Maram as he shrugged his shoulders, then drew the hood of his cloak over his bald head.

And so I told Maram, 'He has no hold over us - at least, not our hearts.'

'But what of our gelstei?' He drew out his firestone and stared at it. 'I'm afraid of what I feel building inside this. I
am,
Val.'

'It will be all right,' I told him.

'It will
not
be all right, just because you say so.' He turned in his saddle to look back at Bemossed, riding next to the children.
'He
was supposed to take control of the Lightstone from Morjin.'

'Give it time,' I told him.

'Time,' he muttered. 'In another day, I think, we'll come to the Skadarak. Who knows, we might have entered it already.'

His deepest fears, however, and my own, proved groundless. After some more miles of. riding through gray-barked trees shedding their leaves, we came to that strip of forest bordering the marshland to the south and the Skadarak to the north. I led the way straight into it. We rode on and on into a smothering still-ness, and soon the sky grew thick with black clouds, and we all heard the call of a voice we dreaded above all others. But then Bemossed nudged his horse up close beside me. He smiled at ml and the sun rose in that dark, dark place. Alphanderry came out of nowhere to sing us a bright, immortal song. And although the terrible voice continued murmuring its maddening tones, as it always would, we did not listen. And so we completed our passage of the Skadarak once again.

The workings of fate are strange. We had traveled all the way from Hesperu nearly a thousand miles across some of Ea's harshest and deadliest country without incident, almost as if we had gone on a holiday. Now, with only one last stretch of forest to negotiate before reaching our journey's end, Maram rejoiced that our luck had held good. But he rejoiced too soon.

The woods of Acadu, as we discovered, proved to be infested with even more Crucifiers than before, for Morjin had sent a battalion of soldiers down from Sakai to quell the unrest and exterminate the forces opposing him. We did what we could to avoid them. The trees, however, more and more barren with every mile that we pressed eastward toward winter, provided us little cover. We had trouble crossing Acadu's rivers: the great Ea and the Tir. We hoped to fall in with the Greens and gain a little protection for at least a part of our passage, but we learned that these Keepers of the Forest had concentrated their forces for a great battle up north of the minelands, where Acadu bordered Sakai. I set a course almost due east, over wet leaves and between trees that seemed as dead and gray as ghosts. Thus we made our way through the rainy and dark days of late Ashvar by ourselves.

We came close to the Nagarshath range of the White Mountains safely. And then, within a span of fifty miles, we fought two battles. In the first of these, a squadron of soldiers came upon us at the edge of a farmer's field, and they demanded that we surrender up Atara and Estrella to 'cook and provide comfort for them,' as they put it. We killed these ten Crucifiers quickly, down to the last man. Two days later, with the jagged, white-capped peaks of the mountains gleaming through the leafless trees, a band of Acadians who had gone over to Morjin tried to relieve us of our possessions -as well as our lives. We fought an arrow duel with them: Kane put a feathered shaft through their leader's eye, while Maram killed two men with arrows buried exactly in the centers of their chests. Seeing this, their companions lost heart and melted away into the forest. We all made ready to rejoice then, but we discovered that Daj had taken an arrow straight through his thigh. Remarkably, he bore this nasty wound without crying out or making any sound. He kept his silence, too, as Master Juwain drew the arrow with great difficulty, for its barbs had caught up in Daj's tendons Bemossed managed to heal his torn and bleeding leg with little difficulty, and within an hour, Daj could walk with little pain. I, however, suffered a stab of guilt that would not go away, for this was the first time in our travels that one of the children had been seriously wounded.

At last we came to the place where the forest's trees rose up the steep slopes of the mountains. We found the ravine by which we had come down into Acadu months before, and now we made our way up into it. The ascent was hard, for Ashvar's rains had fallen here as snow, which grew deeper and deeper the higher we climbed. It grew much colder, too. I kept watching the sky for sign that the clouds might thicken up and loose upon us a major storm. 'If it
does
snow too much or too long,' Maram said, giving voice to my thoughts, 'we could be trapped here all winter. How much food do we have left? Ten days' worth? Twenty, if we stretch it?' 'Be quiet!' Kane told him, looking about the trees of the snow-covered ravine. 'If we have to, we can always kill a few deer.'

'If any remain this high up,' Maram said, shivering. He watched his horse's breath steaming out of its nostrils.

'So, if we
really
have to,' Kane told Maram with a wicked light in his eyes, 'we could always kill
you.
I'd bet that you'd keep us in meat longer than three fat bucks, eh?'

To emphasize his point, he moved over and poked his finger into Maram's belly, still quite rotund, though considerably diminished due to the hardships of our journey. And Maram said to him,
'That
is not funny! You shouldn't joke about such things!'

Something in Kane's voice, however, caused Maram to look at him to make sure he really
was
joking. With Kane, one never quite knew.

'I'm afraid that snow or no snow," Master Juwain said, 'we must go on. Tomorrow is the twenty-eighth of Ashvar.'

'Are you sure we're not late?' Maram asked as he pulled his cloak tighter around his throat and stamped his boots in the snow. 'It feels more like Segadar - and late Segadar at that.'

'I've kept a count of the days,' Master Juwain reassured him. 'But are you certain about the twenty-eighth? I haven't had a clear sight of the stars for half a month.'

'I am not the greatest astrologer, it's true,' Master Juwain admitted. 'But if my calculations are correct, then tomorrow the moon
will
conjunct the Seven Sisters.'

Again, I gazed skyward at the overlying sheet of gray above us. Who could tell where the moon would cross that night? Who could even see the sun, much less the stars?

We continued climbing up into the mountains, all the rest of that day and most of the next. One of the pack horses stumbled in the deep snow, and broke its neck on some rocks. It died before Bemossed could even attempt to help it. Later, the foot of Daj's wounded leg began to freeze, and we had to stop more than once to thaw his toes. Finally, though, we came up to a wall of rock where one of the tunnels through these mountains opened like a yawning, black mouth. With great satisfaction, Master Juwain announced that we still had hours to spare.

'The conjunction should occur late tonight,' he informed us, 'just two hours before dawn.'

'Ah, it
should
occur,' Maram agreed, 'but what if it doesn't? I wish Master Storr had given us one his gelstei so that we could unlock this damn tunnel any time we pleased.'

But Master Storr, I thought, for all his hope that our quest would end successfully, had not been willing to entrust the key to the Brotherhood's secret school to wayfarers who might be captured and might surrender up his precious gelstei to Morjin.

'If you're wrong about the date,' Maram said to Master Juwain, 'when is the next nearest motion of the stars that will open this?' 'Not until the second of Triolet. I don't think you would want to wait that long.'

'I don't want to wait another hour, much less twelve,' Maram said. 'But I suppose there's no help for it?'

If Bemossed had doubted that the pool in the Loikalii's vild might provide a passage to the stars, he could not deny the magic of the tunnel. Two hours before dawn, with the sky beginning to clear, we entered this dark tube of rock. It came alive in pulses of iridescent light. As before, its workings made us sick in our stomachs and disoriented us; and as before, our focused will took us through it, out into that beautiful, sunny valley that sheltered the Brotherhood's greatest school.

This time, no trick of Master Virang or our own blindness kept the sight of it from us. We rejoiced at the cluster of gleaming stone buildings by the valley's frozen river. It took us until mid-morning to ride down through the drifts of snow and reach this haven. Abrasax and the six other masters, with all two hundred of the men who lived and studied here, came out of their dwellings and gathered in front of the great hall to greet us. When Bemossed fairly dropped off his horse, stiff and nearly frozen, Abrasax gazed at him for a long time. I sensed that he was seeing in him colors other than those of the outer world; the green of the fir trees; the sweeps of white snow; the blue sky's brilliant golden sun.

'Valashu Elahad,' Master Storr said, standing next to Abrasax, 'brings
another
stranger into our valley.'

Estrella came up to Bemossed, and took his hand. She waved her other hand about in the frigid air as if she desperately desired the gift of being able to talk to us again. But as Abrasax had said months before, her words held less power than did her eyes or her heart. She looked at Bemossed in adoration, with a perfect brilliance felt by all who stood gazing upon them. For a long moment, it was Estrella who seemed to speak, in sparkling streams and shimmering oceans deeper than any words, while Master Storr stood there struck dumb like a mute - and so it was with the other Masters of the Seven, and all the Brothers, as well as my friends and even myself.

'He is no stranger,' Abrasax said as he bowed his head to Bemossed. Then held up his long, wrinkled hand, and shouted out: 'It is he whom we've known from all our books and dreams! The quest has been completed! Valashu Elahad and his companions have found the Shining One!'

Then he cast aside all decorum and restraint, and he rushed forward to embrace Bemossed, as he did with each of us in our turn. His old face warmed with the brightest of smiles.

Even the dour old Master Storr couldn't help smiling along with him, and he called out, 'Then they have brought us the greatest, gift in the world - and just in time for your birthday, Grandfather!'

All the rest of the Seven and the two hundred Brothers standing about in the snow let out a great cheer. Abrasax's attention finally turned from the miracle of Bemossed's existence to the sorry state of our clothing, mounts and our care-worn flesh. Then he commanded us to repair to the guest houses and recover from our great journey.

The next few days were a time of rest and restoration. We took up residence in the two guest houses by the river, and we spent whole hours bathing our worn bodies in the great cedarwood tubs that the Brothers kept full of steaming hot water. We sat with the Brothers in the great hall to take our meals: simple, sustaining foods such as beef and barley soup, lamb stews, and hot bread drenched with sweet butter. We slept as much as we liked, in good beds, swaddled in crisp cotton sheets and thick quilts stuffed with goose down. At night, it grew bitterly cold in those high mountains, and it seemed impossible that we had ever suffered through the Red Desert's inexorable heat. As well, we had a hard time imagining that there were places and things in the world that were not bright and clean and good.

Abrasax's one hundred and forty-seventh birthday arrived on the third of Segadar, and the Brothers and my companions all gathered for a great feast to celebrate it. All that day Liljana had

labored in the kitchens baking chocolate and raspberry cakes, which were Abrasax's favorite. When it came time to eat them, he praised her artistry and declared that in all his long life, at this school and others, he had never tasted a confection so fine as the one Liljana baked for him. He commanded that the Brothers break out their reserve of rare teas to accompany the cakes; all present stirred into their cups an orange blossom honey from Galda that was rarer still. Its sweetness, Abrasax said, would always remind him of this evening with Iiljana and the rest of our company - and, of course, with Bemossed. We might have luxuriated thusly all winter, and fallen into indulgence or even sloth. But when Master Okuth deemed us sufficiently strong, Abrasax appointed each of us tasks: Master Juwain was to record a complete account of our journey, paying particular attention to what we had discovered in the Vild and in Senta's Singing Caves, Abrasax asked Liljana to begin imparting to the Brothers her great knowledge of herbs and poisons, as well as her many recipes for delicious foods that were unknown to them. He commanded that Daj and Estrella should receive instruction in ancient Ardik and other languages, as well as mathematics, music and the arts. When Daj complained that he would rather spend his time completing the
Gest of Eleikar and Ayeshtan,
Abrasax arranged with Master Nolashar for Daj to work this composition into his music lessons. Atara he set to caring tor the horses, sheep, cows and pigs that the Brothers kept in their stables. It was hard, often dirty work, unfit for a princess, much less a great warrior of the Manslayer Society, but Atara surprised us all by looking after these animals with a love that she often found difficult to tender to human beings. Strangely, Abrasax insisted that Kane and I should spend at least three hours each day practicing with swords. And stranger still, he asked Maram to sit at a desk composing a whole new set of verses for 'A Second Chakra Man'.