Black Jade (73 page)

'How far is it,' I asked Atara, riding over to her, 'to the Yieshi well?'

'I'm not sure,' she told me from beneath the sweat-stained shawl that covered her face. 'I cannot
see
distances with my sight as you can with your eyes. But perhaps twenty miles.'

From here, I guessed that it couldn't be more than a hundred and twenty miles to the mountains and the streams that we presumed we would find there. But without any water at all, it might as well have been a hundred and twenty
thousand
miles.

By late morning, my mouth and throat had grown so dry, I could speak only in croaks, like a toad. By midafternoon, with the sweat soaking my robes, I could think of nothing but water. I was ready to try to chew the juices out of the bitter soap grass or even to bite open my horse's neck to drink down a little blood. The burning thirst of my friends made mine a hundred times worse.

Then, near the day's end, we crested a swell of ground and found ourselves looking down into a depression that might have been made by the drying-up of a lake. Two black tents poked up against the brown, sun-baked earth. At the center of the depression stood the circular wall of rocks: the Yieshi's well. A half dozen of the Yieshi stood there, too, or so we presumed the dun-robed figures near the well to be.

At the sight of us, just after Alphanderry had vanished into nothingness, one of them drew a saber that flashed in the late afternoon light. We rode closer, and I saw that he was about ten years older than I, with a face as sharp as obsidian and a scowl showing rows of white teeth. A young woman called to a boy tending some nearby goats, and then gathered two other children behind the meager protection of the well. An older woman with skin like dark, wrinkled leather hurried over to the well too. I guessed that she must be the man's mother.

We rode even closer, and the eyes of all the Yieshi grew wide with astonishment. The man shouted out to us: 'Who are you? From where do you come?'

Ten yards from the well, we all climbed down off our horses. I moistened my lips with some of the sweat pouring from Altaru's neck, and I croaked out to him: 'I am Mirustral, and we are pilgrims seeking the Well of Restoration. And we have come from the east, across the Tar Harath.'

As I pointed behind us at the glowing duneland, the man's astonishment turned to disbelief. He shouted at me: 'No one crosses the Tar Harath! You are a liar - either that or the sun has made you mad!'

'The sun has made me thirsty,' I said to him. 'And my friends, too. Have you any water to spare?'

The man looked at the old woman standing behind the well, and then looked back at me. He shook his sword at me and said, 'For madmen we have none, for that would be a waste. And for liars, we have only steel!'

Kane, perhaps even thirstier than I (and perhaps a little mad), whipped free his long kalama and advanced on the man. He growled out, 'So, we have steel for you, too! Let's see whose is quicker and sharper!'

'Kane!' I called out. I moved to grab him, but he was too quick for me. And so I shouted, with greater force: 'Kane! Let us give them gold for their water,not steel!'

Although the old woman's face brightened at this, it seemed that Kane hadn' heard me. He might have succeeded in quickly cutting down this bellicose man if Estrella hadn't sprinted forward, throwing her arms around Kane's waist and looking up with her dark, warm eyes as if pleading with Kane to put away his sword.

Kane came to a halt and rested his hand on top of Estrella's head. He glared at the man with black eyes full of fire.

Now Liljana came forward and walked past the' swords of both Kane and the startled Yieshi man, straight up to the well. She held out a gold coin to the old woman and said, 'We are neither mad nor liars - nor are we thieves. Why don't we sit together and tell our stories? At least let our children have a little water, if you've none for us.'

As quick as an ostrakat pecking up a lizard, the old woman's hand darted out and snatched up the coin. Then her face softened, and she said to the younger woman: 'Let them have water, Rani.'

The younger woman heaved a leather skin into the well. It made no splash but only sent up a sound like that of wet clothes beaten against a rock. Moments later Rani drew up a bucketful of muddy water that seemed more mud than water.

'You shall all of you drink, not just your children,' the old woman said to me. 'But we've no water to spare for your horses.'

After that Kane and the Yieshi man sheathed their swords. His name proved to be Manoj, and he presented to us his mother, Zarita, his wife and their children: Tareesh, Lia and Yiera. While Rani went to work filtering the well water through a filthy cloth, we sat on goatskins to tell our stories, even as Liljana had suggested.

It took some time to get Manoj to speak, but when he finally did, he was cordial enough, if not friendly. He eyed Kane suspiciously as he told us that he had quarrelled with the cousins of his clan, who had gone on to the wells in the north to wait out the heat of the summer. Manoj, though, had chosen to remain alone with the rest of his family at this well, where they eked out a living from a few goats and sheep, and a little dirty water.

When Rani had finished her work, she hefted up a waterskin and went around filling our cups, I didn't mind the earthy, slightly brackish taste of the water. In truth, I had to restrain myself from gulping down the precious liquid like a dog lest I spill a single drop on the dry ground.

'Very well Mirustral,' Manoj said to me when I had drunk my fill, 'Now tell me how it is possible for pilgrims to cross the Tar Harath.'

In the last heat of the day, I told him about the much greater heat of the deep desert and how the four Avari warriors had helped us survive it. Although I could not give away the secret of the Vild I admitted that we had found water in a place where none believed water to be.

'I've heard it said that there is water hidden by the dunes,' Manoj told us, 'but I never believed it. If this girl led you to it, then she is a treasure greater than gold.'

He nodded his head at Estrella, who sat cupping Oni's blue bowl between her hands. Ever since we had left the Loikalii's woods, she had tried to unleash the gelstei's power.

'Perhaps,' Manoj said, 'she will lead you to water in the miles between here and the mountains.'

'Is there no other well in all that distance?'

Manoj shook his head. 'There
is
a well but it is dry, stone dry, as it will remain until Ashavar, when the rains come.'

I looked off into the west, at the dusty, dry folds of ground where bits of thombush and spike grass grew, I said, 'We cannot go on to look for more water without water
now,
for our horses.'

I turned to watch Altaru sweating in the sun. It pained me that I had broken my promise to him by drinking before he did, but there was no help for it. I could not give him, or any of the horses, water that the Yieshi denied us.

Manoj regarded him, too, and then looked at Atara's roan mare, Fire. He said, 'Those are fine horses, the best I have seen, even if too thin. We
might
find water for them, but we haven't enough for your other horses - we've barely enough to get us through the summer.'

This, I thought, looking at Manoj's skinny goats grazing about, must be true. If his well ran dry, he and his family would perish. We could not buy or play upon his sympathies to yield up what he could not give us. But neither could we water Altaru and Fire and simply let our other horses die. 'I'm sorry, Mirustral,' Manoj told me.

As it became clear that we remained in a desperate plight, Estrella squeezed her blue crystal with a surprising fierceness. Something inside her seemed suddenly to click, like an iron key fitting into a lock. She rose up and looked about her. She began walking, out into the desert where she came upon a low, flat rock near a thorn-bush. There she stood, facing west and holding up her blue bowl to the sky.

'Father, what is she doing?'

This question came from Lia, a girl about Estrella's age.

It was Daj who answered Lia, saying: 'She is summoning rain.'

Manoj and his family must have thought Daj mad after all, and Estrella more so, for she stood gazing in the direction of the setting sun and did not move. Almost immediately, however, the wind began blowing out of the west. It built quickly and unrelentingly to nearly the force of a gale, and drove sand in a stinging brown blanket across the Yiehsi's encampment.

I shielded my eyes and watched awed as the first dark clouds appeared on the horizon; the wind drove them straight toward us at an astonishing speed. The air fell colder and moister, and ran with electric currents. Whips of lightning cracked down from the clouds, splitting the ground with flashes of brilliant white-orange fire. Then the sky above us grew nearly as black as night. Manoj's children fled into the comfort of their mother's and grandmother's robes, but they could give them no protection from this wild storm.

A great thunderbolt shook the earth beneath us, and a strange burning smell charged the air.

And then the clouds opened, unleashing rain in sheets and streams. It rained so hard that we could scarcely breathe. Our robes quickly soaked through as if plunged into a lake. We cringed and shivered against the icy torrents raging down from above us.

Then Kane let loose a great laugh that tore from his lungs like a thunder of his own. He stood and stripped off his useless clothing, standing naked beneath the black sky. He raised back his head as he opened his mouth and let the rain pour down his throat. He I raised his hands straight up as if summoning the heaven's lightning himself. To Manoj, he must have seemed as mad as the world about us. But Kane was the first of us to seize the moment, grabbing up waterskins from the terrified horses and opening them to the deluge. It alarmed me how quickly the skins swelled with water.

The ground beneath us, too, began overflowing like a suddenly rising lake. If this storm had caught us in a ravine, raging rivers of water would surely have drowned us; as it was, I feared that this ancient basin might prove a deathtrap if it rained much longer, for there was no drainage here and the sky seemed to hold entire oceans of water. I shouted at Estrella to put down her bowl; she did not hear me. She remained standing against the storm's ferocity with her eyes closed and her arms frozen out, holding up the blue bowl. The rain had now filled it many times over, and water poured from it as from an infinite source. I ran over to her then. I eased the bowl out of her cold fingers, and tried to cover her with my robe. She finally opened her eyes. Her smile drove through the storm like the sun.

Soon after that, it stopped raining. The clouds broke apart, blew away and vanished into the blueness of the twilight sky. The desert about the well had been changed into a wetlands of pools, puddles and water holes drilled down into acres of mud. Rani, with bucket in hand, discovered that the well was full - fuller than it had ever been before, even in the months of winter.

'Rain in Marud!' she marveled, looking about the well. 'You are not pilgrims, but sorcerers!'

Then she gazed at Estrella in awe. 'No, I should call you instead a water witch as lived in the ancient ages - a worker of miracles!'

That night, in honor of miracles, Manoj slaughtered his fattest goat and roasted it beneath the light of the moon. The fire, made from moist, woody thornbush dried our garments even as the

greasy smoke worked its way into our skin and hair. We ate succulent meat and goat cheese. Manoj fed Estrella choice tidbits from his own hand and wanted to know how she had called up the storm. So did Master Juwain.

Bui their words only amused Estrella. She suddenly hooked together her thumbs, shiny with goat grease, and moved her fingers up and down around them as of the flapping of wings. Her face came alive with a succession of delightful expressions, and she made other signs, with her fingers and hands. Daj interpreted this mysterious language as best he could, telling Master Juwain; 'It is like this, sir: everything touches upon everything else. And so even the tiniest act can ripple out into the world with great effects. The beating of a butterfly's wings can cause a whirlwind a thousand miles away. I think Estrella has found a way to be that butterfly.'

Manoj considered this as he called for Rani to pour some fermented goat's milk for us to drink. He looked at Estrella and said, 'Well, then, little butterfly - where will you fly to next?'

I sensed that he wished to follow us on our quest, to see what other miracles Estrella might bring forth. For his sake, and ours, I told him only that we sought a wondrous source of healing deep in the mountains.

'In Sandar?' he asked us.

Sandar, I thought, letting that name's sounds play out inside me. Could he mean Senta? For nearly a thousand miles we had debated our route into Hesperu. Once we had decided on crossing the Red Desert and the Crescent Mountains, it seemed wisest to go down into the north of Hesperu through Senta in the mountains' southern part. A good road, we knew, led from Senta through that difficult terrain. But how we were to negotiate the even more difficult terrain between the edge of the desert and Senta had remained a mystery.

'You
must
be bound for Sandar,' Manoj said to us. 'Like the pilgrims of old.'

Senta, of course, had drawn pilgrims from across Ea for ages: all from roads leading from Surrapam, Sunguru or Hesperu itself. We knew of no ancient route from the Yieshi's lands to this fabled city.

Master Juwain regarded Manoj with his clear, old eyes as he rubbed the back of his head and asked. 'And how did the ancient pilgrims find their way to Sandar?'

'From the Dead City.'

The puzzled look that Master .Juwain traded with Kane caused Manoj to add: 'It was once called Souzam. It is said that there is a road leading out of there to the west - at least there was once. No Yieshi would ever go into the mountains to find out if this is true.'

Further questioning prompted Manoj to tell Master Juwain that the Dead City, or Souzam, lay only a hundred miles from his well at the foot of the Crescent Mountains.