Black Jade

‘So, just so,’ I whispered.

And with this sudden affirmation, my heart opened, and my sword filled with the light of the stars. Then, to my astonishment, its substance began radiating a pure and deep glorre. This was the secret color inside all others, the true color that was their source. It flared with all the fire of red and shone as numinously as midnight blue, and yet these essences – and those of the other colors it contained – were not just multiple and distinct but somehow one. Kane called it the color of the angels, and said that it belonged far away across the heavens, in the splendor of the constellations near the Golden Band, but not yet here on earth. For most men had neither the eyes nor the heart to behold it.

‘So bright,’ I whispered. ‘Too bright.’

I, too, could not bear the beauty of this color for very long. And so as the world continued its journey into night and carried the brilliant stars into the west, I watched as the glorre bled away, and the radiance of my sword dimmed and died.

I returned to the fire after that and lay down on my furs to sleep. But I could not. As my sword remained within its sheath, waiting to be drawn, I knew that the glorre abided somewhere inside me. But would I ever find the grace to call upon it?

3

The next day’s dawn came upon the world with a red, unwelcome glare. We ate a hasty breakfast of rushk cakes smeared in jelly and some goose eggs that Liljana had reserved for especially difficult work. And our riding that morning, while not nearly so fast or jolting as that of the previous day, was difficult enough. We set out parallel to the mountains, and our course here took us southeast over ground humped with many hummocks and rocky crests. We crossed streams all icy cold and swollen into raging brown torrents that ran down from the great peaks above us. All of us, I thought, rode stiffly. We struggled to keep our tired horses moving at a good pace. Often I wondered at the need, for no matter how quickly or slowly we progressed, our enemy in their carmine-colored armor kept always a mile’s distance behind us.

‘Surely they don’t intend to attack us,’ Maram puffed out as he nudged his horse up beside me. ‘Unless Bajorak is right and they are only waiting for reinforcements.’

Toward this contingency, Bajorak had sent forth outriders to search the grassy swells and sweeps of the Wendrush.

‘Of course,’ Maram added, ‘it seems most likely that they only intend to follow us into the mountains.’

‘We cannot go into the mountains,’ I told him, ‘so long as they do follow us.’

‘Ah, it seems we cannot go at all unless we find this Kul Kavaakurk. Where is this gorge, then? How do we know it really exists?’

Maram kept on complaining at the uncertainties of our new quest as his eyes searched the folds and fissures of the rocky earth to our right. His voice boomed out into the morning, and Master Juwain caught wind of our conversation. He rode up to us and told Maram, ‘It surely does exist.’

‘Ah, sir, but you are a man of faith.’

‘I have faith in our Brotherhood’s lore.’

‘But, sir,’ Maram reminded him, ‘it is our Brotherhood no longer.’

‘And that is precisely why you are ignorant of this lore.’

‘Lore or fables?’

‘The Way Rhymes are certainly no fables,’ Master Juwain said. ‘They are as true as the stories in the Great Book of the Ages. But they are not for the common man.’

He went on to speak of that body of esoteric knowledge entrusted only to the masters of the Brotherhood. As he often did when riding – or sitting, standing or even sleeping – he clutched in his hand his travelling volume of the Saganom Elu.

‘Ah, well,’ Maram said to him, ‘one of the things that I could never abide about the Brotherhood was this madness for books.’

‘A love for books, you mean.’

‘No, it is more of a bibliolatry.’

‘But the Way Rhymes are recorded in no book!’

‘And that is precisely the point,’ Maram said, needling him. ‘The Brotherhood makes an idol of the very idea of a book.’

Master Juwain’s homely face screwed up in distress. ‘It is one of the noblest ideas of man!’

‘So noble that you withhold this lore from men? Should not all that is best and most true be recorded in the Saganom Elu?’

Now Master Juwain’s lips tightened with real pain. And he held up his worn book as he tried to explain to Maram: ‘But all is recorded there! You must understand, however, that this rendering of the Saganom Elu is only for men. It is said that the Elijin have a truer telling of things, recorded on tablets of gold. And the Galadin as well have theirs, deeper and truer still, perhaps etched in diamond or read in starfire, for they are deathless and cannot be harmed, and so it must be with their writings. And the Ieldra! What can any man say of those whose being is pure light? Only this: that their knowledge must be the brightest reflection of the one and true Saganom Elu, the word of the One which existed before even the stars – and which was never created and therefore cannot be destroyed.’

For a while, as our horses made their way over the uneven ground at a bone-bruising trot, Master Juwain continued to wax eloquent as his ideals soared. And then Maram rudely brought him back to earth.

‘What I always detested about the Brotherhood,’ Maram said, ‘was that you always kept secrets from lesser men – even from aspirants such as I when I, ah, still aspired to be other than I am.’

‘But we’ve had to protect our secrets!’ Master Juwain told him. ‘And so protect those who are not ready for them. Is a child given fire to play with? What would most men do if given the power of the Red Dragon?’

I turned in my saddle to look at the Red Knights trailing us as if bound to our horses with chains. I wondered yet again if Morjin rode with them; I wondered what he would do with the unfathomable power of the Lightstone.

Maram must have sensed the trajectory of my concerns, for he said to Master Juwain: ‘And so like precious gems, like gelstei hidden in lost castles, you encode these precious secrets in your rhymes?’

‘Even as we encode the way to our greatest school.’

Maram sighed at this, and he sucked at his lip as if wishing for a drink of brandy. ‘Tell me again the verses that tell of this school.’

Now it was Master Juwain’s turn to sigh as he said, ‘You’ve an excellent ear for verse when you put yourself to it.’

‘Ah, well, I suppose I should put myself since you have honored me with this precious lore that you say is no fable.’

‘It is not a question of honor,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘If I fall before we reach the school, at least one of us must know the verse. Now listen well and try to remember this:

Between the Oro and the Jade

Where sun at edge of grass is laid,

Between the rocks like ass’s ears

The Kul Kavaakurk gorge appears.

Maram nodded his head as his fat lips moved silently. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, ‘Well, the first two lines are clear enough, but what about the third? What about these “ass’s” ears?’

‘Why, that is certainly clear as well, isn’t it? Somewhere, at the edge of the steppe, we will find two rocks shaped like an ass’s ears framing the way toward the Kul Kavaakurk.’

‘Why two rocks, then?’

Master Juwain cast Maram a strained look as if he were being as dull and difficult as an ass. He said, ‘How many ears does an ass have?’

‘No more than two, I hope, or I would not want to see such a beast. But what if the line you told me was instead:

Between the rocks like asses’ ears

That could mean two asses or three, and so there could be four rocks or six – or even more.’

As Master Juwain pulled at his ruined ear, the one into which Morjin’s priest had stuck a red-hot iron, he gazed at the mountains to the west. And he said, ‘I’m afraid I hadn’t thought of that.’

‘And that is the problem with these Way Rhymes of yours. Since none of them are written down, how are we to make such distinctions?’

Master Juwain fell quiet as we trotted along. Then he thumped his book yet again and said to Maram, ‘The words in here are meant to be clear for any man to read. But the words in the Way Rhymes are only for the masters of the Brotherhood. And any master would know, as you should know, to apply Jaskar the Wise’s Scales to any conundrum.’

‘Scales?’ Maram said. ‘Are we now speaking of fish?’

‘Now you are being an ass!’ Master Juwain snapped out.

‘Ah, well, I must confess,’ Maram said, ‘that I do not remember anything about this Jaskar the Wise or his scales.’

‘Jaskar the Wise,’ Master Juwain reminded him, ‘was the Master Diviner and then Grandmaster of the Blue Brotherhood in the Age of Law. But never mind for right now who he was. We are concerned with the principle that he elucidated: that when faced with two or more equally logical alternatives, the simplest should be given the greatest weight.’

‘And so we are to look for an ass’s ears, and so two rocks and not four, is that right?’

‘I believe that is right.’

Maram covered his heavy brows with his hand as he scanned the great wall of the Nagarshath along our way. And he said, ‘I haven’t seen anything that looks like ears, those of an ass or any other beast, and we’ve come at least a hundred and forty miles from the Jade.’

‘And we’ve still another forty until we reach the Oro. And so we can deduce that we’ll come across this landmark between here and there.’

Maram looked behind at our pursuers and said, ‘Closer to here would be better than closer to there. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this. I hope we find these damn donkey’s ears, and soon.’

After that we rode even faster through the swishing grasses along the mountains, and so did the men who followed us. I, too, had a bad feeling about them, and it grew only hotter and more galling as the sun rose higher above us. I turned often to make sure that Karimah and her Manslayers covered our rear, just as I watched Bajorak and his Danladi warriors fanned out ahead of us. After brooding upon Master Juwain’s and Maram’s little argument and all that my friends had said to me the night before, I finally pushed Altaru forward at a gallop so that I might hold counsel with this strong-willed headman of the Tarun clan.

After pounding across the stone-strewn turf and accidentally trampling the nest of a meadowlark, I came up to Bajorak. He held up his hand and called for a halt then. When he saw the look in my eyes, he led me away from Pirraj and the huge Kashak and his other warriors. He reined in his horse near a large boulder about fifty yards from his men. And he said to me, ‘What is it, Valashu Elahad?’

For a moment I studied this great Sarni warrior, with his limbs, neck and head encircled in gold and his face painted with blue stripes like some sort of strange tiger. Most of all I looked deeply into his dazzling blue eyes. And then I asked him: ‘Do you know of two rocks, along the mountains, shaped like an ass’s ears? There would be a span between them – and possibly a stream or a river.’

His eyes grew brighter and even harder, like blue diamonds, as he stared at me. And he answered my question with a question: ‘Is that where we are to escort you then?’

‘Perhaps,’ I told him.

His fine face pulled into a scowl, and he snapped his braided, black quirt against his hand. ‘I know not of any ass’s ears, and I care not.’

I couldn’t keep down my disappointment, and he must have felt this for his eyes softened as he said, ‘But there are two great rocks like unto those you describe, about ten miles south of here. We call them the Red Shields. If that is your destination, however, you would have had a hard time finding it.’

‘Why so?’

‘Because the Shields face east, and we approach them from the northwest. From our vantage, we will see only their edges – and the rocks and trees on the slopes behind them.’

I continued gazing at him, and I finally asked, ‘Do these shields, then, guard a gorge cutting through the mountains?’

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I know not. No Sarni would ever journey into the mountains to find out.’

He turned to snap his quirt toward the mountains, and asked me, ‘What is the name of this gorge?’

Our eyes locked together, and something inside him seemed to push at me, as I pushed at him. I said, ‘If you’ve no care for gorges, you would have even less for its name.’

Now he whipped the quirt against his hand so hard that it instantly raised up a red welt – but no redder and hotter than his anger at me. He seemed to bite back words that he might regret speaking. He turned away from my gaze to look at the mountains and then behind us at the Red Knights, who had also paused to take a rest. Then his eyes moved toward my friends, grouped together in front of the Manslayers; I knew with a painful leap of my blood that he was watching Atara.

‘What have I done,’ he asked, ‘to make you scorn me so?’

And I blurted out: ‘I do not scorn you, only the way that you look at one … whom you should not look at at all.’

Astonishment poured out of him like the sweat that shone from his brow and beaded up on his golden fillet. And he said to me, ‘Atara is a great warrior, and more, imakla! And even more, a beautiful woman. How should a man look at such a woman, then?’

Not in lust, I thought, fighting at the knot of pain rising up in my throat. Not in such terrible desire.

He turned back to me, and his astonishment only deepened. And he half-shouted, ‘You are Valari, and she is Sarni – half-Sarni! And she is your companion in arms who has yet to fulfill her vow! You cannot be betrothed to her!’

‘No, we are not betrothed,’ I forced out. ‘But we are promised to each other.’

‘Promised how, then?’

I watched Atara giving Estrella a drink from her water horn, and I said, ‘Promised with our hearts.’

I did not really expect this savage Danladi warrior to understand such deep and tender sentiments, for the Sarni beat their women when they displease them and rarely show them kindness. And so he astonished me once more when he said, ‘I am sorry, Valashu, I will not look at her again. But I, too, know what it is to love this woman.’

I glared at him and said, ‘My father taught me that one should not mistake lust for love.’

‘No, one should not,’ he agreed. ‘But it surprises me to hear a Valari speak of love.’

‘I have heard,’ I told him, ‘that you Sarni speak of love only for your horses.’

He patted the neck of his brown stallion as he smiled sadly. ‘That is because you know little about us.’

Some hurt in his voice – seething and keen and covered with layers of scar – made me feel my way past my jealousy deeper into his being. And what I sensed pulsing inside him so fiercely was only love. Love for Atara, love for his family, for his horses or the beautiful land over which they rode, I could not tell. It didn’t matter. For this bright flame filled my blood and broke me open, and I could never scorn him again.

‘And you,’ I said to him, ‘know little about us.’

His eyes softened, and he looked at me strangely as he said, ‘I have heard what the Red Dragon did to your land. What he did to your mother and grandmother.’

My eyes filled with a hot stinging, and the green grasses of the steppe beyond Bajorak’s wild, mournful face grew blurry. I swallowed against the lump in my throat and could not speak.

Now he wiped at his own eyes, and his throat seemed raw and pained as he said, ‘When I was twelve years old, the Zayak crossed the Jade to raid for women. They surprised us, and many were taken. My mother, my sister, too – Takiyah was her name. But they would not consort with the Zayak, and so their chieftain, Torkalax, scourged them with his quirt and gave them to Morjin. But they would not be slaves in Argattha either, and they tried to kill themselves to keep Morjin’s priests from possessing them. It mattered not. The filthy Red Priests ravished them all the same. And then Morjin crucified them for the crime of trying to steal the use of their bodies from the priests. It is said that he set them in his great hall as an example to others. A gem seller who did business with my father brought us the news of their torture. And on that day my father made me vow that I would never make peace with the Zayak or with Morjin.’

Out on the steppe, a lion roared and a meadowlark chirped angrily – perhaps the same bird whose nest Altaru had destroyed. And I said to Bajorak, ‘Our enemy is one and the same, and so there should be no quarrel between us.’

‘No quarrel, perhaps. But the enemy of our enemy is not always our friend. Were it so, we would make cause with the Marituk, who hate the Zayak as much as we do.’

‘It is hard,’ I said to him, ‘for a Valari and a Sarni to be friends.’

‘And yet you and the Manslayer call each other “friend”, if nothing more.’

I saw him searching for something in my eyes as he gazed at me. And I searched for something in him. I found it beneath his gold-studded armor in the sudden surge of his blood. It was the promise of life, the very pulse of the world and breath of the stars. When I opened my heart to him, I felt it beating strong, wild and true.

‘Friends,’ he told me, ‘do not keep secrets from each other.’

‘No, they do not,’ I said.

It came to me then that I had a sort of Scales of my own, for I gave great weight to what my heart told me was true. One either had faith in men, or not. As Bajorak looked at me so openly, without entreaty or guile, I knew that I trusted him and that he would never betray me.

‘The name of the gorge we seek,’ I told him, ‘is the Kul Kavaakurk.’

I went on to explain the nature of our quest. Only the Maitreya, I said to him, could contend with Morjin for mastery of the Lightstone. We had no idea where on Ea to search for this great-souled being, but the Grandmaster of the Great White Brotherhood in their ancient school in the mountains above us might know.

‘It is a small hope,’ I said to him. ‘But unless the Maitreya is found, it won’t matter if the Danladi or Kurmak or Valari refuse to make peace with Morjin. For Morjin and all his allies will make war against us and destroy us one by one.’

‘No, that will not be,’ he said. ‘Morjin may indeed destroy us. But not one by one.’

And with that, he leaned out away from his horse and extended his calloused hand toward me. I grasped it in mine, and we sat there for a few moments testing each other’s resolve. With a gladness that he could not contain, he looked at me and smiled as he said, ‘Friend.’

I smiled, too, and nodded my head. ‘Friend.’

Each telling of the truth, I suddenly knew, was like a whisper that might grow into a whirlwind.

‘It is a strange thing you do,’ he said to me, ‘seeking this Maitreya instead of gold, women or war. And you, a great warrior, or so it’s said.’

‘I’ve seen enough war to last to the end of my days if I lived another ten thousand years.’

And Bajorak surprised me once more, saying, ‘So have I.’

I took in the paint on his face, the saber thrust through his braided gold belt and the great horn bow strapped to his back. I said to him, ‘I have never heard a Sarni warrior speak so.’

Again he smiled, an expression made difficult by the scars cutting his cheeks. And he said, ‘I have wives and daughters, and I would not see them violated by any man. I have a son. I would hear him make music.’

My eyes filled with amazement as I smiled at him.

‘Promise me, Valashu Elahad, that you will not tell anyone what I have told you here. For me to speak of love is one thing. But if my warriors heard me speak of ending war, they would think me mad.’

‘All right,’ I said, clasping hands with him again, ‘I promise.’

He nodded his head to me, once, fiercely, and then turned his horse about and rode back to his warriors. And I returned to my friends, who were gathered in a circle on top of their horses between the Bajorak’s Danladi and our Manslayer rear guard.

‘Well?’ Maram called out to me as I came up to them. ‘What was all that about?’

Kane, however, needed no account of my meeting with Bajorak to know what had transpired. His black eyes were like two disks of heated iron as he said to me, ‘So, you told him.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had to.’

‘You had to?’ The muscles beneath his wind-burnt jaws popped out as if he were working at a piece of meat. I knew that he was furious with me. ‘Ha! – we will see what comes of this. Your fate is your fate, eh? Some men wait for theirs, but you have to go rushing in, like a child into a dragon’s den.’

After that we continued our journey toward the place that Bajorak had told of. Five miles we put behind us in less than an hour before pausing to water the horses at a little stream trickling through the grass. I kept a watch on our enemy, and wondered yet again why they took such pains to keep their distance from us.

‘It must be,’ I said to Atara as she sipped from her water horn, ‘that Morjin does not wish me to catch sight of his face.’

‘Perhaps,’ she told me. Maram, Liljana and Kane stood next to her along the stream listening to what she had to say. ‘But consider this as well: If it really is Morjin, he must know, or guess, our mission. It would be hard for him, I think, so terribly, terribly hard to decide between letting us lead him to the Maitreya and killing us while he had the chance.’

‘He has little chance,’ I said. ‘And if he comes too close, it is we who shall kill him.’

But fate was to prove me wrong on both these counts. Just as we bent low to refill our horns in the ice-cold water, I saw Bajorak, farther down the stream, suddenly put away his horn and throw his hand to his forehead like a visor. He looked out toward the east, where a grassy rise blocked sight of the flatter country there. A few moments later, a dappled horse and a Sarni warrior charged up over the rise and galloped straight toward us. I recognized the man as Ossop, one of the outriders that Bajorak had sent to keep watch on our flank.

We mounted quickly, and Kane, Atara and I rode over to learn why Ossop returned in such haste. Karimah and one of her Manslayers met there in front of Bajorak as well, just as Ossop called out: ‘They come, out of the east, and five miles behind me!’

He pulled up and gasped out that another company of Red Knights, fifteen strong, and twenty-five more Zayak warriors were quickly bearing down upon us.

I turned to look for them, but could see little more than the windswept rise running parallel to the eastern horizon. To the northwest, the Red Knights who had trailed us so far were remounting their horses. And so were the twenty-five Zayak warriors who rode with them.

‘Now we’ve no choice!’ I said, looking at our enemy. ‘It’s too late to attack them, and so we must flee!’

I pointed at two long strips of red rock marking the front range of the White Mountains five miles away. If these were truly the edges of the Ass’s Ears – or the Red Shields – Bajorak was right that they appeared very different from this point of view.

‘Hold!’ Kashak called out to Bajorak. Although this huge man had a savage look about him, with his ferocious blue eyes and bushy blond, overhanging brows, I sensed in him little that was actually cruel. But he was quite capable of dealing with life’s cruelties in a businesslike and almost casual way. ‘Hold, I say! We agreed to escort the kradaks to the mountains, and so we have done. If we remain here, trapped between two forces and these cursed rocks, we’ll be slaughtered along with them. Let us therefore leave them to what must befall.’