Black Jade (82 page)

'Yes, Maram, I did,' I told him. But I didn't quite know how to explain that I had wished this most intently and called out the loudest scarcely an hour before is the cavern called Ansunna, where one's dreams and deepest desires might be made real.

Master Juwain, I noticed, was looking at me with great curiosity, as was Liljana. Then Maram insisted that we climb down off our horses, and so we did. He brought out two cups and the very last of his brandy. Alter filling them, he gave one into my hand and raised up the other. Starlight illumined the wide smile breaking upon his face, and the wind whipped at his hair. Then he clinked cups with me, and drank down his brandy, as did I. He embraced me as he thumped my back and cried out, 'Val, Val - It's good to see you again! It's good to be alive!'

Was it possible, I wondered? Could it be that what I had wished for most fervently in the seventh cavern had somehow come to pass?

When I remarked upon the mystery of how Maram could have acted upon my wish many days before I even wished it
.
Atara turned toward me and said, 'Time is strange. In the eternal realm, that of the One, there is no time. But even in
this
realm, all things of the world take their being from the One, and there are moments when past, future and present are as one. If I can cast my second sight into time that is yet to be, why shouldn't you be able to sing your wishes into the past?'

Why not, indeed? I wondered as I watched Maram licking drops of brandy from his moustache.

Our talk of wishes and singing impelled a recounting of what we had found inside the Singing Caves. I almost couldn't bear to tell Maram of the marvels he had missed. He was a man who loved music and beauty almost as much as he did women and wine. If he had stood in the great cavern of the Galadin by my side and had sung out with his great heart, I wondered what he would have wished for?

'Ah, but it's too bad I
didn't
hear all those songs,' he said to us. 'Maybe we should consider going back, then. We still have some hours before daybreak. Wasn't the whole idea of passing through Senta to gain some sort of idea as to where we might find the Maitreya?'

I was about to tell him that we had heard thousands of mentions of the Maitreya, all to no avail, when Daj straightened up on top of his horse, and called out in his high voice, 'But we do know! At least, we know where we might look for him.'

We turned to stare at Daj. I said to him,
'What
do you know? And why didn't you tell us before?'

'I'm sorry,' he said to me, 'but I heard someone singing of this in the Minstrels' Cavern just as we were passing back through it. I thought that there would soon be a battle, and when there wasn't, when the doors opened and we found everyone dead and Kane hurried off, and then we did, too - well, there hasn't been
time
to tell you.'

'We've time now,' I said, looking up at the stars.

And Daj told us, 'It was a woman's voice - I never heard her name. She came to Senta to sing praises of a man, a healer who had saved her daughter. Some incurable disease it was, and the daughter was wasting away. Just a year ago! She never spoke the healer's name, either. But she said that he had brought a bright light back into her life, and she called this man her "Shining One".'

'Oh, excellent!' Maram said. 'A nameless women praising a nameless man for a miracle that occurred we know not where.'

'But we
do
know where!' Daj said to Maram. 'The woman said that her husband had crossed the whole north of Hesperu to bring her daughter to this healer. In a place called Jhamrul.'

Daj, though he had been born in Hesperu's Haraland, could not tell me if Jhamrul might be a district, city or village, nor did he have any idea where we might find this place. Master Juwain got out his maps then, but the light of the stars proved too little to read by. But Master Juwain had an excellent memory, and he could not recall any marking on his maps of that name.

'We'll have to ask after this Jhamrul, then,' he said. 'When we reach Hesperu, surely someone will have heard of it.'

According to his maps and what he had learned through making inquiries, it was nine miles from the Singing Caves to Hesperu's frontier, and then another nine miles down from the mountains into the populated parts of the Haraland. Without wasting any more words, we resumed our journey. We all hoped, I thought, that we were nearing its culmination, if not its end.

Only one road led from Senta into Hesperu. We followed it through the rocky bowl in which this tiny kingdom was sited to the southern wall of sheltering mountains. Weariness worked deep into me so that I felt every jolt of my horse down into my bones. It was even worse for the others, and I feared that we were all too tired to ride through the night. We could not, however, remain within the reach of King Yulmar should Babul and Pirro break their vows and King Yulmar prove to be neither as honorable nor courageous as they had promised. And so we drove ourselves and our horses over the rocky, rising ground with as much speed as we could summon.

Soon we worked our way up to a high pass between rows of ice-capped peaks gleaming in the starlight to either side of us. The air fell cooler and shimmered with the brilliance of the stars. Which one, I wondered, might point our way to the Maitreya? Was he sleeping somewhere down in the land beyond the mountains? Or did he stand awake on some hilltop or in a window gazing up at the same bright stellar vista as did I?

Time is strange, Atara had said to me. That night, on our push into Hesperu, the hours seemed to draw out almost endlessly long as if the world itself hung perfectly balanced in black space and could never move. And yet taken as a whole, the night fairly flew by, and I could no more hold onto the fleeting moments than I could a streaking arrow. I felt myself rushing toward my fate. Whatever star called
me
onward pulled with a force I could not resist and filled my blood with an unquenchable fire.

At last we found ourselves braving the narrows of the pass called the Khal Arrak. Here, in a cut through the earth scarcely a quarter mile wide, walls of rock rose up to our left and right. Long ago Senta and Hesperu had agreed that this place should mark the frontier between their two kingdoms. I thought it curious that neither had built any sort of fortress here to guard their, side of the pass. But then I had grown to manhood in Mesh, where twenty-two kel keeps guarded the passes into Ishka, Waas and the plains of the Wendrush where the warriors of the Urtuk and Mansurii tribes cast hateful and envious eyes upon my homeland. Enemies surrounded Mesh on all sides, but for thousands of years Senta and Hesperu had dwelt with each other in peace. Although King Arsu might have thrown in with the Red Dragon and made noises of war that disturbed the Sentans, it seemed that both he and King Yulmar wanted to believe the fiction that Senta had nothing to fear from Hesperu, or the reverse. Or perhaps it was a point of pride. In either case, it worked to our advantage that no soldiers stopped us to question us and make sure that we weren't revolutionists sent to subvert King Arsu's realm.

'It's too quiet,' Maram said to me in a low voice as we moved along the narrow road. The sharp tattoo of our horses' hooves striking stone edhoed off the rocky walls around us. 'I can hear my belly grumbling - I missed dinner, you know. Ah, I can hear
myself
grumbling, and I should tell you I'm sick of it. And sick of forsaken places like this. Have you noticed that the nastiest of surprises have Invariably awaited us in mountain passes?'

I thought of the stormy pass high in the White Mountains where Ymiru and the 'Frost Giants' had sprung up our of banks of snow and had nearly clubbed us to death with their fearsome borkors. I remembered, too, the great while ghul of a bear sent by Morjin to slay us beneath the slopes of Mount Korukel, and of course the first droghul who had come upon us in the cleft of ground between the Asses Ears. And later, Jezi Yaga. Most of all, I couldn't shake loose from my mind the images of Atara nearly dying from a dreadful arrow wound in the Kul Moroth. where Morjin's soldiers under Count Ulanu
had
in fact sent Alphanderry on to death.

'It will be all right,' I murmured to Maram, The wind whooshing through the Khal Arrak carried scents of wildflowers and wet rock, 'Nothing will happen to us here.'

I was filled with great hope. The glimmer off the glaciers above us cast a faint light upon Maram's face. It was a magnificent thing that he had done, journeying across hundreds of miles of Ea's wilds by himself.

'Maram, have I thanked you for saving my life . ., again?'

'Ah, I
did
save you, didn't I? There was no way out of those damn caverns, was there?'

'I can't think that we escaped them,' I said, looking at the rocks pressing in upon us, 'only to be trapped here. Surely our fate lies farther on.'

'Surely it does,' he said. 'But how
far
on? A mile? Two? If Kane fails to stop that rider, we'll likely meet a Red Priest and a cadre of Crucifiers coming our way.'

'Kane won't fail,' I told him. 'And if he does, once we're out of this gorge, we'll hide far from the road.'

For another mile, however, I listened to every hoofbeat and breath as we wound our way through the pass's narrows. Then, in terrain that must have been claimed by Hesperu, the narrows gave out into a gap several miles wide. A razor-backed ridge marbled with snow rose up to our left while humps of broken ground gleamed in the starlight to our right. I espied many large boulders, behind which we might hide at need. Bui the earth remained quiet, and so we followed the road as it twisted sharply right and left on its descent into Hesperu.

Dawn's light revealed that we were passing through a valley full of trees lower down and ragged snowfields higher along steel-gray slopes. To the sides of the road, the slanting fields glowed orange with the lichens growing on rocks, and showed the greens, purples and whites of mosses, sky pilots and saxifrage. With every mile that we rode further into this new realm, we lost elevation and the snow quickly gave way to swaths of emerald forest. The valley broke up into a hilly country that opened out to the east, west and south. Behind us, limned against a blue sky, the white peaks of the Crescent Mountains guarded the tiny kingdom of Senta. And then the road led us into a thick forest of dogwoods and oak, and the sky vanished from sight.

Two hours later, as we were rounding a bend in the road, I stopped suddenly and drew my sword. My eyes fixed on a large oak, covered with moss and hung with vines. And then a familiar voice called out to us, 'It's good I'm no Red Priest with a gang of Crucifiers at my call, for I heard you coming a half mile away.' And Kane stepped from behind the tree's cover.

He gave no welcoming smile as he began pacing toward us with a heavy step. Over his back he slung his heavy leather saddle.

'Where is your horse?' I asked him, looking for the Hell Witch.

'Dead,' he sighed out. 'I had to ride her into the ground trying to catch up with that damned traitor.'

'And did you?'

We all waited for the answer to this question.

'Yes,' he finally said. Although speech seemed to distress him, he added, 'We needn't worry about the Kallimun being warned of us, at least not here and not yet. Now, why don't we take a little breakfast? There's a stream down the road not far from here.'

When we came to the stream, we moved off into the woods, and Liljana cooked us a breakfast of ham, fried eggs and toasted wheat bread. I had never seen Kane eat with so little appetite. He sat on a downed tree poking at a piece of ham with his dagger, and then staring at the blade's shiny steel. Even the news that we hoped to find the Maitreya in a place called Jhamrul failed to enliven him.

After that we took a few hours of rest while Kane stood guard over us. Before I drifted off, I saw Kane staring at his hand as if he had to will himself to keep his eyes open. But I sensed a terrible and ancient torment that ate at his heart and kept him from joining us in sleep.

When it came lime to set out, Kane threw his saddle on top of one of the remounts. If riding this big gelding in place of the Hell Witch vexed Kane, he gave no sign of it. In truth, he did not speak at all, and he hardly moved his dark eyes, not even to scan the woods for enemies.

Later that day, we came down into a flatter country of low, wooded hills and rolling farmland. The air grew sweltering, and seemed to soak the earth like boiling water. We all sweated beneath our thin robes, and swatted at the tiny gnats that came to bite us. The road led us over streams on rotting wooden bridges, and then over a much larger stone construction joining the muddy banks of one of the Haraland's numerous rivers. Not far from it we encountered a woodcutter who had bound some faggots of oak across the back of his dog, a giant mastiff. The flesh of the dog's hindquarters had been ripped open: it looked as if the woodcutter had whipped him. I wanted to give this cruel-looking man a wide berth, but Master Juwain insisted that we should ask him for directions.

'Jhamrul?' the man said to us, scratching at his greasy beard. 'I never heard of it. Why would pilgrims such as yourselves want to go there?'

'We seek the Weil of Restoration,' Master Juwain told him, 'said to lie near there.'

'The Well of Restoration? I never heard of that, either. And I don't want to.'

The gaze of his bleary eyes took in Daj and Estrella sitting on their horses and finally came to rest on Kane. Something tightened inside the woodcutter then, and he gripped his axe and said, 'You pilgrims should keep to this road, and not go wandering about where you don't belong. Now, let me be on my way - I've work to do.'

A
farmer whom we came across an hour later proved no friend-lier and no more helpful. And so we continued down the road, asking after Jhamrul, although I dreaded what we might find around the next bend or awaiting us in the Haraland's towns. I hated nearly everything about this country: the steamy, stifling air overlaying field and forest, its sullen people, and even its strange flowers, all waxy with bizarre colors and exuding a sickening, too-sweet fragrance. The very smell of the Haraland tormented me, for it was of sweat and dung running off sun-baked fields into muddy rivers - and of blood, fear, decay and death.