Black Jade (18 page)

Again he eyed the saddlebags as if hoping that Master Juwain or I might retrieve a bottle and rescue him from his vow And then he shook his head and muttered, 'Well, if I can't drink to what's best in life, I'll sing to it. Abide a moment while I make the verses - abide!'

Here he held out his right hand as he placed his other hand over his closed eyes. His lips moved silently, but from time to time he would call out to us, 'Abide, only a few moments more - I almost have it.'

As Kane heaped a couple more logs on the fire, we all sat around listening to its crackle and hiss, and looking at Maram. At last he took his hand away from his thick brows and looked at us. He smiled hugely. And then he rose to his feet and rested his hands on his hips as he stared at Master Juwain and called out in his huge, booming voice:

The higher man seeks higher things:

Old tomes, bright crystals, angel's wings.

He lives to crave and pray accrue

The good, the beautiful, the true.

And there he slithers, coils and dwells

In higher hues of higher hells;

In sixth or seventh wheels of light –

There's too much pain in too much sight.

But 'low the belly burns sweet fire,

The sweetest way to slake desire.

In clasp of woman, warmth of wine

A honeyed bliss and true divine.

I am a second chakra man;

I take my pleasure where I can;

At tavern, table and divan –

I am a second chakra man.

As Maram sang out these verses, and others that flew out of his mouth like uncaged birds, he would strike the air with his fist and then lewdly waggle his hips at each refrain. He finally finished and stood limned against the fire grinning at us. No one seemed to know what to say.

And then Kane burst out laughing and clapped his hands, and so did we all. And Atara said to him, 'Hmmph, if you had remained with the Kurmak and taken wives as my grandfather suggested, these second chakra powers of yours would have been put to the test.'

'How many wives, then?'

'Great chieftains take ten or even twenty, but it's said that only a great, great man such as Sajagax could satisfy them.'

Here she smiled at Liljana, who added, 'Our order has discovered that when a woman awakens the Volcano, which we call Netzach, it would take ten or twenty
men
to match her fire.'

'Do you think so?' Maram said with a wink of his eye and yet another gyration of his hips. 'I should tell you that my, ah,
greatness
has never thoroughly been put to the test. Perhaps I'm a fool for even considering marriage with Behira only and cleaving to Valari customs.'

'Would you rather try our Sarni ways?' Atara asked him.

'In this one respect, I would. I'd take twenty wives, if I could. And I would, ah, entertain all of them in one night.'

'My
tribemates?' Atara said. 'They would kill you before morning.'

'So you say.'

Atara laughed out, 'And you would have them call you "Twenty-Horned Maram" I suppose?'

'Just so, just so. It would create a certain curiosity about me, would it not?'

'That it would. And you'd be happy satisfying this curiosity with other women who
weren't
your wives, wouldn't you?'

'Ah,' he said with a rumble of his belly and a contented belch, 'at least
someone
understands me.'

'I understand that if you practice your ways on the women of
my
tribe, their husbands and fathers will draw their swords and make you into No-Horned Maram.'

In the wavering firelight, Maram's happy face seemed to blanch. And he muttered, 'Well, I don't suppose I'd make a very good Sarni warrior. I'll have to practice on other women I meet along the way.'

Atara fingered the saber by her side. And this fierce young maiden told him, 'If you must - but just don't think of practicing on
me.'

At this, Maram held up his hands in helplessness as if others were always conspiring to think the worst of him. His gaze fell upon Liljana, who said to him, 'I should warn you that if you brought your horns to a practiced matron of the Maitriche Telu she
would
likely kill you - with pleasure. Perhaps you'll find a nice harridan somewhere in these mountains.'

The ghostly white peaks of the Nagarshath gleamed faintly beneath the stars. It seemed that there were no other human beings, much less willing women, within a thousand miles.

'Maram would do better,' Master Juwain said, 'to practice the Rhymes I've taught him. Now, why don't we all retire and get a good night's sleep? Tomorrow we'll journey up this valley and see what lies at the end of it.'

He smiled at Maram and added. 'Tell me, again, won't you, the pertinent Rhyme?'

And, again, Maram dutifully recited:

At gorge's end, a wooded vale;

Its southern slopes show shell-strewn shale.

Toward setting sun the vale divides;

To left or right the seeker strides.

Recall the tale or go astray:

King Koru-Ki set sail this way.

Except for Kane, who took the first and longest of the night's watches, we all wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and lay down on our sleeping furs. Maram spread out next to me, and I listened to him intoning verses for much of the next hour. But they were
not
those that Master Juwain hoped for. I smiled as I drifted off to sleep with the sound of my incorrigible friend chanting out:

I'm a second chakra man

I take my pleasure where I can .
..

The river wound through woods and meadows, and I couldn't help thinking of it as a mighty brown snake. No great rocks or other obstacles blocked our way. The ground was good here, easy on the horses' hooves, and provided all the fodder they needed to carry us higher into this beautiful country. By noon, the place where the valley came up against the mountain at its end was clearly visible; by late afternoon we reached the divide told of in the Way Rhyme. To the left of the mountain, the valley split off toward the south. And to the right was a great groove in the earth running between the rocky prominences north of us.

We all sat on our horses as we considered the next leg of our journey. Master Juwain, upon studying the lay of the land, turned to Daj and said:

Recall the tale or go astray: King Koru-Ki set sail this way.

'Well, young Dajarian - which way is that?'

And Daj told him: 'North, I think. Didn't King Koru-Ki set out to find the Northern Passage and the way to the stars?'

'You know he did,' Liljana said to him. 'Didn't I teach you that the ancients believed that the waters of all worlds flow into each other? And that there is a passage to other worlds at the uttermost north of ours?'

As Daj looked at Liljana, he slowly nodded his head.

'Very good, then,' Master Juwain said. He smiled at Maram. 'We'll turn north, tomorrow - are we agreed?'

'Ah, we were agreed before we reached this place.
This
Rhyme, at least, was easy to unravel.'

'Indeed it was. But the Rhymes grow more difficult, the nearer we approach our destination. Let's make camp here tonight and ponder them.'

And so we did. That evening, after dinner, I heard Maram repeating the verses to the Way Rhymes as well as those of his epic doggerel that he insisted on adding to. Over the next few days, as we continued our journey, the Way Rhymes, at least, guided us through the maze of mountains, valleys and chasms that made up this section of the lower Nagarshath. Through forests of elm and oak, and swaths of blue spruce, we rode our horses up and up - and then down and down. But as the miles vanished behind us, it became clear that our way wound more up than down, and we worked on gradually higher. Each camp that we made, it seemed, was colder than the preceding one. On our fourth day after the King's Divide, as we called it, it rained all that afternoon and turned to snow in the evening. We spent a miserable night heaping wood on the fire and huddling as close to its leaping flames as we dared, swaddled in our cloaks like newborns. The next day, however, the sun came out and fired the snow-dusted rocks and trees with a brilliance like unto millions of diamonds. It did not take long for spring's heat to melt away this fluffy white veneer. We rode up a long valley full of deer, voles and singing birds, and we basked in Ashte's warmth.

And then, just past noon, we came upon a landmark told of by the Rhymes. Master Juwain pointed to the right as he said, 'Brother Maram, will you please give us the pertinent verses?'

And Maram, making no objection to being so addressed, said:

Upon a hill a castle rock.

Abode of eagle, kite and hawk.

From sandstone palisades espy

A tri-kul lake as blue as sky.

As Altaru lowered his head to feed upon the rich spring grass blanketing the ground, I sat on top of his broad back and stroked his neck. And I gazed up at the hill under study. A jagged sandstone ridge ran along its crest up to some block-like rocks at the very top, giving it the appearance of a castle's battlements.

'This is surely the place,' Maram said, holding his hand against his forehead. 'But I see no eagles here.'

And then Daj, who had nearly the keenest eyes of all of all of us, pointed to the left of the hill at a dark speck gliding through the air and said, 'Isn't that a hawk?'

And Kane said, 'So, it is, lad - and a goshawk at that.'

'If I were an eagle,' I said, looking at the crags around us, 'I think I would make my aerie here.'

'If you were an eagle,' Maram told me, pointing to the north, 'you wouldn't have to climb that hill to spy out the terrain beyond it, as the verse suggests.'

'You mean,
we
wouldn't have to climb it, don't you?'

'I? I?' Maram said. He rested his hands upon his belly and looked at me. 'Surely you're not suggesting that I dismount and haul my poor, tired body up that -'

'Yes, I am.'

'But such ascents were made for eagles or rock goats, not bulls such as I.'

'Bulls, hmmph,' Atara said from on top of her horse. 'You eat enough for an elephant.'

Maram ignored this jibe and said to me,
'You
are the man of the mountains.'

'Yes,' I said, 'and so I'll go with you. And then
you
can recite for me the next verse.'

Maram sighed at this as he grudgingly nodded his head. We decided then that Maram, Master Juwain and I would climb the hill while Liljana and the others worked on preparing lunch for our return.

Our hike up the hill proved to be neither as long or arduous as Maram feared. Even so, he puffed and panted his way up a deer trail and then cursed as he nearly turned an ankle on some loose rocks in a mound of scree. To hear him grunting and groaning, one might have thought he was about to die from the effort. But I was sure he suffered so loudly mainly to impress me. And to remind both him and me of the great sacrifices that he was willing to make on my behalf.

At last, we gained the crest, where the wind blew quickly and cooled our sweat-soaked garments. We stood resting against the sandstone ridge that topped it. We looked out to the northwest where a great massif of snow-covered peaks rose up along the horizon like an impenetrable white fortress. But between there and here lay a country of rugged hills and lakes that pooled beneath them. All of them were blue. Which one might be the lake told of in the Rhyme, I could not say.

'A tri-kul lake,' Maram intoned, looking out below us. 'Very well, but what is that? A "kul" is a pass or a gorge, and I can't say that any of these lakes is surrounded by three such, or even one.'

'Are you sure the verse told of a
tri
-kul lake?' Master Juwain asked him.

'Are you saying I misheard the Rhyme?'

'Indeed you did. The word in question is
drakul
.'

'But why didn't you correct me before this?'

'Because,' Master Juwain said, 'I wanted to give you a chance to puzzle through the Rhymes yourself. Our goal will never be won through memory alone.'

'But what is a drakul then? I've never heard of such a thing.'

'Are you sure? Think back to your lessons in ancient Ardik.'

'Do you mean, try to remember lessons in that dry, dry tongue that I tried to forget, even years ago?'

Master Juwain sighed and rubbed his head, now covered with a wool cap. And he said, 'Why don't you give me the next verses, then? How many times have I told you that clues to a puzzle in one verse might be found in those before or after it?'

'Very well,' Maram said. And he dutifully recited:

The Lake's two tongues are rippling rills

That twist and hiss past saw-toothed hills;

A cold tongue licks the setting sun.

But your course cleaves the shining one.

'No, no,' Master Juwain said to him. 'You've misheard the final line here, too. It should be: "Your course cleaves the
shaida
one".'

'Shaida?' Maram called out. His great voice was sucked up by the howling wind. 'But what is that?'

'Think back on your lessons - do you not remember?'

'No.'

Master Juwain dragged his fingernails across the rough sandstone beneath his hand, then turned to me. 'Val, do
you
remember?'

I thought for a moment and said, 'Shaida is a word from a much older language that was incorporated into ancient Ardik, wasn't it? Didn't it have something to do with dragons?'

Master Juwain smiled as he nodded his head. And then here, at the top of this windy hill, where hawks circled high above us he took a few minutes to repeat a lesson that he must have taught us when we were boys. Two paths, he told us, led to the One. The first path was that of the animals and growing things, and it was a simple one: the primeval harmony of life. The second path, however, was followed only by man - and the dragons. Only these two beings. Master Juwain said, pitted themselves against nature and sought to dominate or master it: man with all his intelligence and yearning for a better world and the dragon with pride and fire. Indeed, because men forged iron ore into steel ploughshares or swords and wielded the coruscating fury of the firestones themselves, our way also was called the Way of the Dragon. It was a hard way, perilous
and
cruel for it led to war and discord with the world - and seemingly even with the One. But out of such strife. Master Juwain claimed like the great Kundalini working his way up through the chakras, would eventually emerge a higher harmony,