Black Jade (42 page)

'The accursed forest,' Berkuar said, looking at me. 'We've surely wandered into it.'

I said nothing because I could no longer deny that I had led us into the one place that Abrasax had warned us we must not go.

For a while, as we waited near the fires and the mist grew thinner, Berkuar stared at me. Maram, I knew, did not like the accusation in his eyes because he came to my defense, saying, 'It's not Val's fault.'

'Did I say it was?' Berkuar asked him. 'The Skadarak might well have grown so that it would be impossible
not
to wander into it. All that matters now is how we will find our way out.'

This proud woodsman did not say what was obvious: that he had become lost in the mist, and could not tell north from south. Neither did his sharp eye for mosses and the like give hint of direction, for none such grew on these diseased trees.

Above us the clouds still gathered so thick and gray that no glow of white marked the position of the sun. Gorman told us that it was often this way in Acadu, in late Ashte, for weeks on end.

'That
way is west,' I said, pointing straight ahead of us. I drew my sword, which glowed faintly when I pointed it toward my right. 'Do you see? Argattha should be to the north of us here, and Alkaladur confirms this.'

Once, my shining sword had led us to Argattha where the Lightstone resided.

'Let us go on,' I said.

'If you're wrong,' Pittock said, 'we could walk straight into the heart of the Skadarak.'

'Yes, that's true,' I told him. 'But so long as we walk
straight,
eventually we'll come out on the other side. Now let's be off.'

We smothered the two fires with some stinking muck and resumed our hike toward what I was sure was west. The walking was easy here, with no bracken or bushes to trip us up; with the lifting of the mist, the drizzle dried up, too, and it grew cool rather than cold. The afternoon's journey might even have been pleasant but for the horror of the blighted woods and our dread of what had made it so. It was a dark wood, to be sure - darker even than the Vardaloon. The trees about showed but little green. They grew black like burnt firewood, and their worm-eaten leaves showed shades of brown and blood-red. But the worst of it, I thought, came not from the omnipresent clouds blocking the sun or the blackening of tree bark; rather, it felt like something from within was stealing their life and dimming their essential light.

As it was with the trees, so it was with us. We walked on into the woods, and we all felt a gradual dampening and draining of our life fires. The earth itself seemed to call us down into herself, and her voice was long, dreadful and deep. By the end of the day, we had to struggle to keep our limbs moving. It was like trying to fight our way out of a lake frozen with slush.

'I'm cold,' Maram grumbled as we trudged along. 'I'm tired and I'm hungry, too. And thirsty. Surely this is a night for a little brandy?'

'Remember your vow,' I said to him. My voice, even to myself, sounded as raucous and repetitive as a parrot's. 'The brandy is to be used only for medicine, and there's nothing wrong with you.'

'Is there not? My whole body feels like one big bruise.' He paused as his glazed eyes took in the darkening woods around us. 'Ah, besides, it's not my body that really needs medicine, but my soul.'

We found no clear brook or stream upon whose banks to break our journey, and so we made camp that night in the middle of the featureless forest. Maram was keen enough to build up a great fire, but Kane had to drive him - and Gorman and Pittock - to gather deadwood for our fortifications. In truth, there seemed no need. Mostly to frighten Maram into activity, Kane spoke of maddened panthers or bears made into ghuls, or even demons that might come for us in the night. But for all that afternoon we had | seen not a single animal larger than a worm. We had seen no sign of men, either, nor did we expect to, for who would be foolish enough to enter such a doomed wood? Kane warned that after our encounter with the droghul, Morjin might send a company of soldiers after us or even the second droghul that Atara had told of. But as a despondent Maram pointed out in a heavy voice, 'Why should he bother, when this damned dark place will do his work for him?'

Master Juwain led us in a light meditation, and that seemed to ward off the worst of the gloom eating at us, at least for a while. I restated my belief that we could simply walk out of this wood whenever we chose. Liljana's response to our predicament was more practical: she willed herself to set to cooking us the best meal she possibly could. We sat down late that night to roast venison and cakes sweetened with some of the apple butter and jams that the Brothers had given us. We had figs for dessert, and then Liljana brewed up some rare mugs of coffee.

This feast should have been enough stuff any man, but Maram ate as for three, cramming food into his mouth with a gluttony that was excessive, even for him. He had the grace, however, to compliment Liljana's cooking and the cunning to extol her sacrifice in working hours late into the night for the sake of our bellies and bodies, to say nothing of our spirits: 'Ah, bless you, Liljana, bless you. No one else could have summoned up such delicious fare in such a place, and no one else would even have tried. I'll go to bed a better man tonight.'

His words brightened Liljana's spirits more than could any of Master Juwain's meditations. She even insisted on staying up late to clean the pots herself so that we could get a good night's rest, and this was no little thing considering that she had little water for the task. She went to work contentedly, almost happily - that is, until she discovered that Maram had appropriated a jar of strawberry jam and consumed all its contents himself. She found this cast-off container in some leaves at Maram's place by the fire. As she held up the empty jar and shook it at Maram, her mood instantly fell from good will toward all men into a rare and shocking fury: 'How can you have gobbled all this down in one meal yourself? Don't tell me there wasn't enough else to eat!'

Maram stammered out, 'I... I, ah, I ate as I always eat! Do I need to ask your leave to have a little jam?'

'You ate
all
the jam - there is no more!'

'Ah, no more
strawberry,
perhaps, but we've jars of blueberry and cherry, and apple butter, too.'

'But strawberry was Daj's favorite! You
knew
this, and you ate it all, even so.'

'Well, I'm sorry,' Maram said. 'Believe me, I can't tell you how sorry I am.'

'You're sorry you got caught, that's all,' Liljana shrilled at him. 'You've no more care for Daj than you do for me - else you would have saved at least a
little
jam.'

Daj, awed by Liljana's rage, stood beside her and looked up at her as if she had transformed into a she-wolf.

'You're a hog,' she said to Maram. 'A great, fat hog of a man, and you've no care for anyone or anything except what's in the trough in front of you!'

Such words can put poison in the soul; in truth, they can poison the soul of the one who utters them, as well. Liljana stood with her hands on her hips, glaring at Maram as he glared back at her. Finally, he muttered something about having to comb down the horses, and stalked off away from the fire.

I took Liljana aside and pressed her hand into mine, trying to draw off some of her fire. I said to her, 'You, of all of us, must keep us together, not drive us apart.'

My words seemed to calm her, but only slightly. She said to me, 'All that I said to Maram was true!'

'Yes, it was true,' I told her. 'But you must know that you shouldn't say it precisely because it
is
true.'

'I
do
know that,' she said, glancing down at the ground. Then she looked at me. 'Thank you for reminding me. The Materix before me - Anahita Kirriland - warned me that I could be as murderous as Morjin if provoked, and I've always known she was right. But that Maram provokes me so! Sometimes I think he hates me!'

'No,' I said, smiling at her. 'He regards you as he would his own mother.'

'Do you really think so? But sometimes he has so little
respect.'

'Don't you think he knows that? Don't you think he knows who he is and wishes to be better, as we all do?'

Liljana's face softened as I said this, and she might have smiled if Morjin hadn't stolen from her this grace. She returned to the task of washing her pots with a lifting of her spirits, if not exactly good cheer. And I went off to speak with Maram.

I found him thirty yards away from our camp, sitting in the dark on a log near a blighted tree. At my approach, he gave a jerk and thrust his hand under his cloak. He moaned out to me, 'Ah, Val, Val - that woman hates me!'

'Of course she doesn't hate you,' I said, stepping closer. 'She's just not herself - none of us are.'

'No, I think she's
too
much herself, if you know what I mean. Oh, too bad, too bad.'

Maram's self-pity swept over me in waves that made me sick in the belly. As he opened his mouth to bemoan his fate for the thousandth time, something else swept over me as well: a blast of brandy-tainted breath.

My sudden fury shocked me as I shouted to him: 'You've been drinking!'

'Ah, well so what if I have!' he shouted back. 'Where's the bottle then?'

From beneath his cloak, Maram withdrew a bottle of brandy unstoppered and half-full judging from the sloshing sound of its contents. The sight of it further inflamed my fury. I lashed out with my fist, knocking his forearm and dislodging the bottle from his hand. It bounced off the log and fell to the forest floor, where its dark brandy ran out onto the ground.

'What have you done?' he cried out.

He lunged for the bottle as if hoping to rescue at least a few drams of brandy. But I caught hold of his arm and jerked him up short.

'What have
you
done?' I yelled back at him. 'Your vow -'

'My vow be damned!' he cried out. 'As we're all damned in this damnable woods!'

For a moment, I wanted to slap the despair from his face. But then the outrage and sense of betrayal that poured out of him stilled my hand. I made a fist again, and bit my own knuckles. And I said to him, 'I. .. am sorry. Please forgive me.'

Then it was my turn to go marching off into the woods. As my boots squeezed the moisture from mildewed old leaves, I tried breathing deeply, as Master Juwain had taught me. I tried meditating upon the brilliance of the rising sun, as he had also taught me in one of his light meditations. Nothing seemed to help. I leaned against the trunk of a twisted tree, and I could not calm the beating of my heart, which jumped in my chest like a hare fleeing a ravenous predator.

'Morjin,' I whispered. 'Morjin.'

I knew that somehow |e was attacking us, through the Black Jade. This cursed crystal called to me through the blackened forest. The very earth beneath my boots seemed to despise me, and promised soon to rot my flesh and bones.

How was it possible, I wondered, that I had nearly struck my best friend? The dark earth of the Skadarak called to the darkest part of me: 
Valashu..
.

I had impulses. All people do. I wanted to run in terror from the beast snapping its jaws at the back of my neck, even as I wanted to pretend that Liljana was my mother and fall weeping into her lap. Whenever I looked at Atara, my arms trembled to crush her to me and kiss her beautiful lips, to carry her off and fill her with the seed of our child. The wound in my back was an outrage that demanded protest. All the wounds that I had taken since I was a child to my body and my soul, gave voice to agony. The pain of the kirax burning up my blood was a fire I could never escape. It made me want to scream at the immense torment of life. My fingers ached to tear out Morjin's liver and cast it to the dogs, as my tongue tingled to taste his blood. As the night deepened and I stood alone in the lightless woods, I wanted to free all these impulses and a hundred more as I might uncage rabid rats -even the darkest and deadliest impulse of all.

Sometime after midnight, I returned to our camp. Master Juwain sat by one of the fires with his eyes fixed upon a page of the
Saganom Elu.
He seemed to be reading the same lines over and over again. Atara was by herself near the other fire seeking knowledge of another sort. When I sat down beside her, her whole body gave a start, and her fingers fumbled to find my hands and face. 'What's wrong?' I asked her. 'It's all dark, now,' she told me.

The heart of this brave woman sent out pulses of fear. 'We'll find our way out of here,' I promised. 'Tomorrow, we will.'

'It won't matter if we do,' she said. 'It's all dark as if there will never be light again. As if there never
could
be light again.'

I tried to lift her fingers toward my lips but she pulled her hand away from me. The coldness that flowed out of her would have frozen the very rays of the sun. 'Atara,' I whispered.

'No, don't say anything,' she whispered back. 'Go to bed and gather some strength for tomorrow. Let me be alone.'

As she wished, I said goodnight to her, but I could not go to sleep. I left her sitting silently by the fire, eyeless in eternity.

As I paced about near the quiet forms of Daj and Estrella, I brooded over all the ways that I might kill Morjin. Once, Atara had warned me that his death would be my own. My fate seemed to be hurtling toward me like a great black stone cast by a cata-pult. I could not step aside to save myself. It made me sweat with a sick, black fear, but I almost didn't care.

Much later my pacing carried me over to the western edge of our encampment where Kane stood leaning out over the fence. He faced the black forest to the west. Where Master Juwain had stared at the same verses in his book, Kane simply stared - at nothing.

'Valashu,' he finally said to me. His voice rolled like a deep and distant thunder. 'Why are you here?'

'I keep thinking of Morjin,' I confessed to him. So do I,' he told me. 'And of Asangal.'

'Why do you speak of the Dark One by that name?'