Black Jade

‘We of the Seven,’ Abrasax said, interrupting him, ‘have not gained immortality – only longevity. And other things.’

‘Ah, what things?’ Maram asked with great interest.

In answer, Abrasax stepped over to him, and he laid his long, wrinkled hands on Maram’s sides along his chest. And then he lifted him as he might a child, straight up into the air. Maram, although obviously no angel, did for a moment appear to be flying. He whooped as he beat his arms like wings. I blinked my eyes in disbelief, for with all the eating he had been doing during the past week, he must have weighed twenty stone.

Abrasax set him down, and Maram stared at him as if he, too, couldn’t believe what had just happened. He said to him, ‘You look like an old bird, but you’re as strong as a bear!’

‘Thank you, I think,’ Abrasax told him.

Maram clasped Abrasax’s hand as if to test its strength. Abrasax squeezed back, and Maram winced and coughed out, ‘Did I say a bear? A bull, you are, a veritable old bull. And all this from the work you do with your little crystals? What other, ah, powers have you gained?’

Abrasax smiled at this and said, ‘What powers would you most like to gain?’

‘Do you need to ask? A bull has only two horns, but I have five! A veritable dragon, I am, and oh how I burn! And so I would strengthen those fires that burn the most pleasurably.’

‘There is more to life, Sar Maram, than pleasure. And there is more to pleasure than this little tickle in the loins that you pursue so ardently.’

‘Yes, there is beer and brandy,’ Maram said. ‘And that which bestirs me down there is no little thing – it is more like dragon fire!’

Abrasax said nothing to this as he studied Maram with his keen eyes.

‘Pure dragon fire, I tell you! And I can direct it as I will, no matter what Master Storr says about me being blocked!’

‘Can you? Then perhaps you wouldn’t mind if we put it to the test?’

‘What kind of test?’

‘One that should prove more enjoyable than one of your drinking duels.’

‘Truly? Truly?’ Maram smiled as he considered this. ‘Then when do we begin?’

Abrasax stepped over to Master Okuth to murmur something in his ear. Master Okuth bowed, excused himself, and left the room. We waited with the other Masters around the tea tables for him to go about his business, whatever it was. Half an hour later, he returned. He produced a small vial containing some dark, reddish substance, which he poured into Maram’s cup of tea and stirred with a little silver spoon. Then he gave the cup to Maram to drink.

‘Ah, I must say,’ Maram called out, sniffing his tea, ‘that this potion of yours seems suspiciously like blood.’

‘It is a tincture made from the pineal gland of the adil serpent,’ Master Okuth told him. ‘It will help dissolve your blockage so that the kundala can rise within you.’

Maram sniffed it again. ‘Are you sure it won’t poison me? Ah, like a snake’s venom, paralyzing me?’

‘It will only paralyze your resistance.’

I gazed at Maram, waiting for him to drink, or not – as did Kane, Master Juwain and Liljana. The Masters of the Brotherhood studied him as well. And then Maram, challenged once again to drink as part of a trial, shrugged his shoulders and downed the red-tinged tea.

‘Aach!’ he cried out, coughing. ‘Ohhh – oh, my Lord, that was vile!’

He looked to Master Okuth for sympathy for his sufferings. But Master Okuth just looked at him sternly as he brought out his small, green heart stone. The other Masters held out their gelstei as well, and they beckoned for Maram to stand up and gathered around him.

Then Abrasax instructed Maram: ‘You must try visualizing that which you most love. Hold this image inside yourself, and let it call to you.’

‘Ah, you mean visualize her whom I love. Make her call to me.’

‘No, Sar Maram,’ Abrasax said. ‘I do not mean that. We have other potions and other exercises designed for the realization of fancies and dreams. You have told us that you are a man of this world. There is something in this world – something that you’ve held in hand and heart – that you love above all else. Hold it in your heart now. And in your mind. Let it call to your life’s deepest fire and draw it upward, even as the kundalini strikes upward, toward the heavens.’

Maram smiled at me then, and I understood that he took great satisfaction in keeping secret whatever it was that he found most to love. Was it Behira, I wondered? The Galdan brandy that Vishakan, chief of the Niuriu, had once poured for him? The smell of the earth on the most perfect day of his life? I thought that I would never know.

Then Maram closed his eyes, and the Great Gelstei of the Seven began to sing to Maram in a rainbow of fire. The Masters worked their magic upon Maram for most of an hour. Finally, there came a moment when I felt something inside of Maram break open. I sensed a great gout of flame moving up from his first and second chakras into his third, fourth and higher ones, as with companions passing from hand to hand a bright torch. Hotter and hotter it grew, like the sun in Soldru. At last Maram opened his eyes, and looked straight at me in triumph. He let out a shout of delight that shook the stones of the dome above us. His face seemed to light up as with fireworks as he cried out, ‘It’s as if the ecstasy of my loins is burning throughout my whole body and brain! You were right, Grandfather: this is more enjoyable than beer, or even brandy!’

‘Even more enjoyable,’ Atara prodded him, ‘than women?’

‘Ah, perhaps, perhaps.’ Maram breathed deeply and raggedly as he held his hand over his heart. Then his eyes glazed with doubt. ‘But it’s almost too pleasurable, if you know what I mean.’

Liljana, whose Maitriche Telu possessed other means of igniting the body’s fires, said to him, ‘And now you know why my sisters are dreaded.’

‘Dreaded or desired?’

Liljana pointed her finger at him as she shook her head. ‘It’s good that we’ve taken shelter here rather than at one of our sanctuaries. If you weren’t careful, my sisters would kill you with just such pleasure.’

‘Truly? Well, I must die sometime, I suppose, and I can think of no better way.’

Whatever fate awaited us on our quest, however, during our final days at the Brotherhood’s school, we had only thought and feeling for more life. As the spring quickened and the warm sun poured down its light into the valley – and the Seven continued pouring their gelstei’s radiance into us – we gained strength like the new shoots of the cherry trees fairly singing with sap. My companions and I all felt more vital. We found ourselves needing less sleep, and during our waking hours we seemed more awake. Although we did not gain the miraculous regenerative powers of Kane, whose flesh I had once seen regrow a severed ear, Abrasax told us that we might bear up beneath insults and wounds that would kill lesser beings.

‘But it is your spirits, I believe, that will suffer the greatest trials,’ he told us one fine morning. It was to be our last day in the Valley of the Sun, and we had gathered with the Masters in the cherry orchard beneath a tree covered in snowy blossoms. ‘The Lord of Lies will attack them, and more, try to drink your very souls. We must speak of this now. If your path is to take you through Acadu, there is one danger that you must avoid above all others.’

Maram’s face blanched while Master Juwain sat on the white-petaled grass with his hands folded like a closed book. And Master Juwain said, ‘And what is that, Grandfather?’

Abrasax looked at Master Juwain for a long moment as his lips pressed together. Then he said, ‘I would like to give you a full account of this. Would you be willing to come with me into the library?’

‘Of course,’ Master Juwain told him.

‘Estrella,’ Abrasax said, turning toward the girl, ‘there is a book that I believe will tell more than I can about this danger. It is, in a way, lost in the library’s stacks. Would you help me locate it?’

Estrella smiled as she nodded her head.

The rest of us, curious as to how this new mystery might unfold, stood up and followed Abrasax as he led us toward the library. This building rose up near the center of the Brotherhood’s grounds, and was made of the same white stone as every other building in the valley. Tall pillars fronted it. Its rear wall fairly pushed into the side of a hill. Although larger even than the great hall, it wasn’t nearly so grand as the library of King Kiritan’s palace – to say nothing of the vast, burnt-out Library of Kaisham.

We followed Abrasax and the other masters up the seven stairs leading to the doorway and into the library’s single room. There, sitting at long wooden tables, a dozen Brothers bent over reading old tomes; a dozen more worked hard to preserve the knowledge of the oldest and most fragile of them, transcribing words onto new paper with ink-blackened quills. This scratching sound filled the quiet room. The many dusty, crumbling books stacked on the shelves along the four walls seemed to await renewal at the Brothers’ hands. I counted some seven thousand of them. As we learned, every one of them had been indexed and accounted for. I did not understand how one of them could have been lost.

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