Black Jade

Chapter 25

Our sleep that night was as deep and cool as the air that fell down from the sky. We took comfort in the softness of the sand beneath our furs and the floors of our tents. Even Maram found ways to position his great body that did not unduly distress him. When it came time to journey again, his big voice boomed out into the darkness: 'There are five good things about this part of the desert. First, the sand makes a good bed. Second, there are no flies. And third, my nightly drink.'

'And the fourth and fifth good things?' I asked him.

If I expected him to extol the splendors of the heavens or the terrible beauty of the desert, then I would have been disappointed, for he said, 'The fourth and fifth good things are the same as the third.'

I smiled into the dark, glad that Maram had found at least a little good in this forsaken land. But he also suffered other things that were not good, as did we all. That day, as we pushed farther into the Tar Harath, it grew even hotter. The blazing sun reflected off the sand nearly burned out our eyes. Breathing itself became a torment, and we all coughed at the dust that the wind blew at our faces. This dust worked its way into the fibers of our clothing and the cracks in our skin. Movement, hour after hour sitting on horseback or walking through the sand, chafed our dirty, sweaty skin. Soon, as Master Juwain feared, the dust might work at us so that we all had sores in our flesh like Maram's.

So it went for the next four days. Our bodies grew thinner, for none of us wanted to eat very much in the unrelenting heat, not even at night when we fell exhausted into our beds. We sweated and drank from our waterskins, and drank and sweated some more We wished for a good bath and clean clothing almost as much as oranges and kammats and other succulent fruits. We watched our water disappear, cup by cup and skin by skin. Once, after a lone afternoon spent nearly dying on top of the burning sand, Maidro caught Maram washing the dust from his face and upbraided him.

'We've no water to spare for such extravagances,' he said to Maram in a raspy, dust-choked voice. 'Every drop of water you waste brings us all an inch closer to death.'

Maram bowed his head in shame, and he apologized for his thoughtlessness. But an hour later, I heard him mutter to himself: 'Every mile we cover brings me that much closer to my brandy. But what then, my friend? How many cups do you have left before our water runs out and brandy is all you have to drink? You can't bear the thirst, can you? No, no, you can't, and so I think that drowning yourself in brandy would be a better way to die.'

We made our way across the sun-seared Tar Harath mile by mile — but we did not cover as many miles each day as we hoped. The sand burned the horses' hooves and slowed them, as Maidro had said. We lost most of a day in circling around a miles-wide basin that Maidro feared contained quicksands. Maram objected to this detour, saying, 'This sand looks the same as any other — how do you know it's quicksand?'

And Maidro, who did not like to explain himself, told Maram, 'If you don't trust me, there is only one way to find out.'

He pointed his wrinkled old finger out toward the basin's sandy center. So despondent was Maram that he seemed to consider walking right out into it.

And then I heard him mutter: 'Ah, if there is no Maram, there is no purpose to the brandy that we've made our poor horses carry. And what will befall then? The brandy will be poured out into the sand. It would be a crime to waste it.'

He turned to Maidro and said more graciously, 'I'm sure you're right about the quicksand. Thank you for saving my miserable life.'

Just before dawn the next day, Arthayn killed the first of the packhorses by slicing his saber through its throat. The other horses had eaten all the grain that this unfortunate horse carried and had drunk its water, as well. For two days, the useless horse had plodded along relieved of its burden, but also denied food and drink. In truth, Arthayn should have killed the thirst-maddened beast the day before, but the Avari — and all of us — kept hoping that we might find water.

We never ceased scanning the rocks and sand and blue horizon for sign of this marvelous substance. We looked to Estrella in hope that she might lead us toward another hidden cave or perhaps some ancient, forgotten well. But she seemed to have no more sense of where we might find water than anyone else. Often she would gaze up at the sky with longing at the few small clouds, which here drifted toward the northwest.

'One cloud,' Maidro said, 'holds more water than a well. But the clouds go where they will, not where we wish. And they never shed their rain in the Tar Harath, not even, I think, at the command of an urda mazda.'

Later that day, at Maidro's command, Nuradayn killed the second packhorse. Maidro stood watching this slaughter and speaking with Sunji. Sunji then gathered everyone around him and announced, 'Our water has grown too little, and so we must forbear meat until new water is found.'

Here he looked at Estrella in utter confidence that she would somehow work another miracle. But Nuradayn, a young man given to wild surges of mood, looked out across the sun-baked dunes with doubt eating at his dark eyes.

The next morning, we came upon a single sandstone pinnacle so smooth and symmetrical that it might have been carved by the hand of man a million years ago. Here Estrella stopped her horse and looked up at the sky to watch a few puffy clouds drift past. Then she looked at me and pointed in the direction that the clouds were moving, toward the north.

'Estrella,' I said to Sunji and Maidro, 'wants us to turn that way.'

Estrella nodded her head at this and smiled. Arthayn nudged his horse forward and squinted at the brilliance of the unbroken sweep of dunes.

He said, 'There cannot be water there.'

Maidro's eyes filled with doubt, too, but he said, 'The girl is an udra mazda. She found water at the Dragon Rocks, in hills that were known to be dry.'

We held coundl then, and decided to turn toward the north, as Estrella had indicated. Maram, I thought, echoed all of our sentiments when he muttered: 'One direction in this damn desert seems as good as another. As they say, when you're going through Hell, keep on going.'

And so we set our course to the north, and slightly west. We journeyed for two more days without seeing any sign of water. During the day we relied on the sun and my sense of direction to hold a straight line across the sand; at night we navigated by the stars. With every mile farther into the heart of the Tar Harath, it seemed to grow only hotter and drier. The air in our faces burned us like the blast from a furnace. Our skin cracked, and the salt in our sweat worked its way into these raw wounds; it seared us as if we were being stabbed with fire-irons. Our noses grew so parched that they bled at the slightest touch. Things were simple in the deep desert, I thought, reduced to the most basic elements: sun and sky, sand and suffering.

Maram, upon grinding his teeth at the torture of his abrasive saddle, said to me, 'Don't you think it's strange that I, who have sought pleasures few men could bear, have instead found so much pain?'

I smiled beneath the cowl smothering me. I asked him, 'Do you still have the stone?'

Maram produced a roundish river stone with a hole burned through its middle. In the Vardaloon, he had used his gelstei to make this hole as a distraction against the mosquitoes. It was supposed to remind him that even the worst torments could be endured and would come to an end.

'I do have the stone,' Maram said to me. 'I only wish I were made of such substance — this damn sun is burning a hole in me.' Later that day the third of our packhorses died, not from the slash of a sword, but from heatstroke: it simply collapsed onto the sand and coughed out its last breath from its frothy mouth. Nuradayn blamed himself for not dispatching it sooner, but as he put it: 'Each time we cut down one of the horses, it's like cutting off our own limbs.'

Travelling as we did by early morning and early night, we lost count of the days: one evening in our tent, Master Juwain sat rubbing his bald head as he told us that he thought it was the fourth of Marud. We lost track of distances, too. We measured our progress not by the mile, but by the hoof and the foot: it took all our strength to keep the horses moving forward, step by step, and when they grew too tired, we had to force ourselves to walk up one dune and down the next. Finally we reached a place where neither days nor miles nor even suffering mattered. In the middle of an expanse of sand nearly as featureless as a sheet of parchment, Maidro suddenly called for a halt. He called for a council, too.

'If we turn back now,' he said to us when we had all gathered around him, 'I believe that we might be able to return to the Hadr Halona.'

'No!' I cried out to him. I looked all around us at the blazing sand. Other than some dunes in the distance and a few low rocks sucking out of the ground, there was nothing to see. 'If we turn back now, we'll lose!'

'If we don't turn back and we don't find water,' Sunji said to me, 'we'll lose, too: our lives.'

'We'll find water,' I said. 'I know we will.'

I looked at Estrella, and so did the rest of us. This slender girl, sitting on top of her spent horse, looked up at the pretty clouds in the sky.

'She follows the clouds,' Sunji said, 'as she has for days. It will not avail us, but who can blame her?'

Estrella, he said, having been acclaimed as an udra mazda, must feel too keenly the desire to satisfy our expectations.

'But surely she must be stymied, as we are,' Sunji said. 'Surely she leads us on in false hope.'

Nuradayn, whose doubt had turned into despair, sucked in air through the bloody shawl wrapped over his nose and said, 'It may have been false for us to have named the girl an udra mazda. What if she found that cave by chance?'

For a while, beneath the day's dying sun, the four Avari debated the signs by which an udra mazda might be recognized. Maidro held that only the grace of the One could lead such a young girl to water, and that chance could have played no part in this miracle. Estrella, he told Nuradayn, was surely who they believed her to be. But then he added, 'Even an udra mazda, however, cannot find water where there is no water.'

We all gazed out at the burning sands where Estrella wanted us to go; almost none of us wanted to go there. The desert itself seemed to drive us back with a hellishly hot wind that seared our eyes. Nuradayn told of a sick heat that fell upon his brain whenever he contemplated taking another step along our course; he said that it must be the will of the One that we would surely die if we went on. We all, I thought, felt something like that. Even Kane regarded the barren terrain before us with a dread that was as powerful and deep as it was strange.

'It is a terrible chance you're asking us to take,' Sunji said to me.

I drew my sword and watched as the sun touched' it with an impossible brightness. I shielded my eyes against its shimmering glorre, and I told him, 'We're well beyond chance now, as you have said. I believe our fate lies out there.'

I looked at Estrella and bowed my head to her. Either one had faith in people, or one did not.

'Fate,' Sunji said, looking out to the northwest. 'Fate,' Maidro repealed, shaking his head.

I saw in his old eyes what he saw: all of us lying dead on the sand without even the ants or the vultures to relieve us of our rotting flesh.

He gazed at Estrella, and then at me. I opened my heart to him then, I found within myself a fierce, fiery will to keep on going. For a moment, it burnt away my fear, and Maidro's as well. 'If we turned back now,' he said, 'we might still reach the Hadr Halona. But then, we might not.'

'One place,' Sunji said to him, 'is as good to die as another.' Arthayn agreed with them, and so, reluctantly, did Ruradayn. I sat there beneath the merciless sun marveling at the courage of these warriors who did not have to make this journey nor fight this battle,

'One thing we must do, however,' Maidro said, 'if we are to go on.'

He told us that we must lighten the horses' burdens, and this meant jettisoning everything not vital to our survival. He was a harder man and more exacting than even Yago. And so we cast away many things that were dear to us. Liljana nearly wept at having to abandon the last of her galte cookware, as did Master Juwain when he removed his steel instruments and medicines from his polished wooden box and left the box to be buried by the sifting sands. Only with great difficulty could I bring myself to part with the chess set that Jonathay had given me at the outset of our first quest — and with Mandru's sharpening stone and Yarashan's copy of the Valkariad. Maram made a great show of surrendering up the heavy wool sweater that Behira had knitted for him. But this sacrifice proved insufficient to satisfy the implacable Maidro. When Maidro discovered that one of our horses carried seven bottles of brandy, he insisted that they, too, be left to the sand.

'But that is our whole reserve!' Maram cried out. 'It is madness to give up good medicine!'

'It is madness to make the horses carry it another mile!' Maidro snapped at him. 'Madness to bring it along in the first place, when this horse could have carried extra waterskins!"

They argued then, with a vehemence and heat like unto that of the desert all around us. For a moment, I thought Maram was ready to strike Maidro. But in the end, all of Maram's bluster could not prevail against this tough, old warrior. Maidro had his way, and we all watched as Nuradayn dropped the brandy bottles onto the sand.

'Damn you!' Maram shouted at Maidro. 'You'll kill me yet!'

He sat down near the bottles, and would not be moved. He shouted out to Sunji, 'You're right, Avari: One place is as good as another to die!'

Again, I worried that we would have to tie ropes around Maram and drag him across the desert. And then Master Juwain came over, and bent down to whisper in Maram's ear.

'Ah, all right — all right, then!' Maram pulled himself proudly back up. He stood glaring at Maidro. 'Let it not be said that Sar Maram Marshayk of the Five Horns abandoned his friends!'

As we made ready to resume our journey, I took Master Juwain aside and asked him, 'What did you say to him? Did you remind him how much we love him and couldn't go on without him?'

'No,' Master Juwain said with a smile. 'I reminded him that I'm still the keeper of the last bottle of brandy, and that he had better get back on his horse if he wants his ration tonight.'

We did not ride much farther that day. Just past dusk, we came upon some low rocks, and Maidro insisted that we should make camp in their lee. He did not say why. Apparently, his argument with Maram had driven him into a disagreeable silence.

We were all grateful for a chance to take a little extra sleep. Even Kane lay down inside the tent with us. I was not sure if he ever allowed himself to slip down into unconsciousness, but it seemed that he dwelt for hours in a realm of deep meditation and dreams.

Just after midnight, with a cold wind blowing against our tent, I felt his hand on my shoulder shaking me awake. I called out into the darkness: 'What is it?'

'Maram,' Kane said to me, 'has not returned.'

I rolled over to pat the empty sleeping fur where Maram should have been. I said to Kane, 'Return? Where did he go?'

'He said that he couldn't sleep. He said that he was going outside to look at the stars.'

Now I sat bolt upright; Maram, I thought, would no more give up his rest to look at the stars than he would to take a walk on the moon.

'How long ago, then?' I asked Kane.

'I'm not sure. An hour — maybe two.'

I grabbed for my sword, then worked my way out of our tent. Kane followed me. The brilliant starlight and half moon illumined our encampment and the desert beyond. The Avari's tent and that of the women stood black and square in a line with ours, behind a rock formation twenty feet high. The horses stood there, too, as if frozen in the eerie stillness with which horses sleep. Maram's horse, I saw, remained with the others. I circled around the mound of rock, hoping to find Maram sitting on top of it or on one of its steps. I looked out into the desert, hoping to see his great shape looming above the starlit sands.

'Maram!' I whispered to the wind whipping out of the northwest. I turned to look off to the south and east, then shouted out, 'Maram! Maaa-ram! Where are you?'

My cries awakened everyone, who came out of their tents rubbing their eyes. I told them what had happened. It was Maidro, with his sharp old eyes, who discovered an additional set of tracks paralleling a mass of hoofprints pressed down into the sand in a long, churned-up groove leading from the direction by which we had come here, from the south. The tracks, Maidro told us, were surely Maram's, for they were deep and pointed back along our route.

'He has given up!' Nuradayn said, without thinking. 'But why didn't he take his horse?'

Nuradyan counted our waterskins, and determined that Maram had taken none of these either.

'He has not given up,' I said to him, and everyone else. 'And he did not take his horse because he wished to steal out of here unheard.'

'But why?' Nuradayn asked.

I looked at Master Juwain, who looked back at me through the weak light. I said, 'Because he knew we would stop him from going back for the brandy.'

I moved to go saddle my horse, and Maram's, but then Maidro stopped me, laying his leathery old hand on my arm. 'No, Valaysu, do not go, not now. I fear that soon there will be a storm.'

I looked up at the glittering sky. Except for some clouds drifting toward the northwest, and strangely, up from the southwest, the sky was perfectly clear.

'Do you mean a sandstorm?' I said to him.

'I have seen signs of it all day,' he told me. 'It is why I wanted to make camp early, behind these rocks.'

'Then all the more reason that I must ride after Maram, before the storm comes.'

Maidro looked past the mound of rocks toward the northwest. The wind from the darkened desert in that direction blew stronger and stronger even as we spoke.

'I think you do not have time,' Maidro told me. 'I think it will storm before another quarter of an hour has passed.'

'Then I must ride quickly,' I said.

Maidro's fingers closed around my arm like iron manacles. 'The storm will sweep away Maram's tracks. You will not find him. And then you both will die.'

'I must go after him!' I said, breaking away from his grip.

I turned again to saddle Altaru, but then Sunji, Arthayn and Nuradayn hurried up to me and grabbed my arms and waist. I surged against them, nearly pulling them up off the sand. But they were strong men, and they held me fast. And then Kane came up, too, and wrapped his mighty arm around my chest. He squeezed me tightly against him as his savage voice murmured in my ear: 'At least wait a few more minutes, as Maidro has said. If he is wrong about the storm, then ride, if you will. The delay will give Maram only that much longer to enjoy his drink. But if Maidro is right, then there is nothing you can do. So, Val, it is only fate!'

I did not want to listen to him. I twisted and stamped about, trying to shake Kane and the Avari off as a stag might hounds. None of my friends came to my aid. Master Juwain appreciated the terrible logic of Maidro's and Kane's argument, and so apparently did Liljana. They stood with the children watching the Avari restrain me. Atara, I sensed, no more wanted me to go galloping off into a sandstorm than she would want to see me plunge into a pool of lava. She waited in the starlight with her beautiful face all hard and cold.

And then there was no starlight — at least not in the northwest. There, the black glittering sky fell utterly black as if a shadow had devoured the stars. The shadow grew, obscuring even more of the sky, even as the wind built into a gale. It drove bits of sand against our garments and unprotected faces; it was like being burned by hundreds of heated iron cinders. In a moment, it seemed, the air about us turned into a gritty, blinding cloud.

'Inside the tents!' Maidro called out. 'Take the waterskins, and keep your shayals moistened!'

Shayal, I remembered as I coughed at the dust, was the Avari's word for shawl. I retreated back inside our tent as Maidro had commanded. So did everyone else. While Kane fastened the tent's opening, I poured water over my shawl and wrapped it around my face. I heard Master Juwain and Daj doing likewise. I could not see them, for our unlit tent had now fallen pitch black.

There was nothing to do then but wait. And wait we did inside our coverings of sheep and goat wool as the storm raged with the force of a whirlwind. Sand whipped in continuous streams against our tent; it was like a roaring thunder that would not cease. We prayed that the stakes holding down our tent would not pull out nor its fabric rip. We heard the horses whinnying in distress, as from far away, but we could do nothing for them. They would smother or not according to the protection that the rocks provided them and their animal wisdom and will to live. We, ourselves, breathed in and out through our moistened shawls, coughing at nearly every breath. We kept our eyes closed lest the dust swirling inside the tent abrade them. In any case, there was nothing to see.

I tried not to think of Maram, trapped out on the wasteland in this terrible, blinding storm. I hoped that he, at least, had found the brandy before the dust swallowed him up. I missed his great presence beside me. It tormented me to lie there in utter darkness, counting the beats of my heart, minute after minute, hour after hour. I waited for the storm to abate, as did everyone else, but it seemed only to grow fiercer and stronger.

We waited all that night into the next day. The air inside the tent lightened slightly into a sort of dusty gloom. And then it grew black again as another night descended upon us and the wind continued to blow. It did not let up until early in the morning of the following day when it ceased abruptly — and strangely.

I came out of our tent to behold a landscape covered with sand, as it always was. In places — in front of our shield of rocks and out beyond — the wind had driven the sand into gleaming, new dunes. Otherwise, the desert looked the same as it always did. The sun blazed low over the eastern horizon, scattering bright light into a perfectly blue sky.

My first concern was for Altaru, and the rest of the horses. Miraculously, they had all survived the storm, though their hooves were buried in a powder-like sand and they were very thirsty. Nurdayn and Arthayn came out to begin watering them, and Sunji and Maidro walked up to me.

'Valaysu,' Maidro said to me, 'I do not think that Maram could have survived the storm. Two nights and a day, out on the sand.'

I stood staring off at the shimmering emptiness to the south, where we had abandoned the brandy.

'The horses survived,' I said to him simply.

'Yes, here behind these rocks. But out there, the wind — '

'Wind can't defeat Maram,' I half-shouted at him. 'Nor can sand nor heat — nor even dragon fire. Only Maram can defeat Maram.'

As I moved to saddle my horse, Maidro said, 'Even before the storm, our position was perilous. And now — '

'Now my best friend is lost out there.. somewhere! The storm obliterated our tracks, so he may not be able to find his way back here. He'll be waiting for me.'

'But how will you find him?'

'I don't know,' I told him. 'But I would have more hope if you would help me!'

Maidro looked at Sunji and Arthayn, who said, 'It is a waste of time, and therefore a waste of water. And therefore foolish beyond folly.'

I stood staring at him in the glare of the rising sun. Finally, he said to Maidro: 'I do not think anything will deter Valaysu. Therefore, we might as well help him, as he has asked.'

We spent ail that day searching the desert for Maram. On our tired, parched horses, we rode south, east, west and north, scan-ning the dunes for any sign of Maram or his body. It was madness, as Maidro said, to go forth beneath the naked, noonday sun, but so we did. All of us nearly dropped from heatstroke. By the time that dusk approached, we had to return to our encampment to keep from falling off our horses.

'Two days now, alone and without water,' Maidro said to me over dinner that night. 'That is the limit of how long a man can live.'

'Four horns of Sarni beer is the limit of how much a man can drink,' I said to him. 'And yet Maram drank five horns and called for more.'

'It is not the same thing,' he told me.

'No, it is not, but I can't give up looking for Maram — not yet.'

That night, for a few hours, we rode out into the desert to search for Maram again. The starlight pouring down upon the pale sands showed not the slightest footprint that might have been made by him. We shouted out his name, but he did not answer us. The next morning, we resumed our quest, until the sun in the afternoon fell down upon us with a fire that we could not bear. When we quit for the day and met up back at our tents, I was forced to concede that the sun could defeat Maram — as it could anyone.

'Surely he is dead,' Maidro said to me. 'As we will be, too, if we do not leave this place and find water.'

I watched Estrella nibbling on a dried fig; Daj sat next to her moistening a battle biscuit with a little water so that he could chew it. In a voice as dry as the wind, I said. 'Surely Maram is dead — reason tells me this. Yet my heart tells me otherwise. If he died, I would know.'

I wondered if this were really true. Then Liljana, haggard and nearly dead of exhaustion herself, said to me: 'You always seem to know when Morjin or one of his kind is hunting you. Wouldn't you likewise know if Maram were still alive and seeking his way back here?'

'He is,' I said, trying to convince myself. 'He must be.'

I looked at Atara, who sat on a rock trying to get a comb through her dirty, matted hair. I said, 'I cannot give up hope yet, but neither can I ask everyone to remain here with me. If we don't find Maram soon, then it will be time to go on.'

At this, Sunji shot me a penetrating look and said, 'But what do you mean by "soon"?'

'Soon,' I said, echoing words that my father had once spoken, 'means soon. Now, why don't we rest before we go out looking for Maram again?'

Our search that night proved to be in vain. The moonlit dunes showed no footprint that Maram might have made nor any other sign of life. I returned to our tents with the others, and collapsed onto my furs. I could not sleep. I listened for the plaint of Maram calling to me; I did not hear him. I felt inside myself for the beating of his heart, however faint, but all that I could feel was the hard, painful hammering of my own. Then I called to him, in my mind, and from some deeper place inside me where a voice as real as the wind always whispered — and sometimes cracked out like a thunderbolt. This terrible sound seemed to tear through my heart and touch even the sands of the earth beneath me.

I was awakened just after first light when Nuradayn shouted out a warning. I came out of my tent, sword in hand, to see him watering the horses and pointing out into the desert. Everyone else left the tents, too, and joined us, looking east toward the rising sun.

The glare of this fiery orb nearly blinded us, so at first it was hard to make out the object of Nuradayn's excitement. But then I held my hand over my forehead and squinted, and this is what I saw: a creature more hideous than Jezi Yaga or Meliadus staggering toward us on two, bird-thin legs. The whole of his body seemed desiccated and shrunken, like a fruit left to bake in the sun. His ribs stood out like the frame of a wrecked ship; his belly had fallen in so that it practically clung to his spine. He was entirely naked, and his skin from head to foot had the look of sun-blackened leather. His lips seemed to have been peeled back from his teeth and gums, giving him the appearance of a flayed animal. Although many old wounds were eaten into his arms, chest, thighs and other parts of his body, none of them bled or oozed the slightest moisture. His eyes seemed as dry as bone, and fairly clicked about and rolled inside his skull as if he had no control over them. They appeared to see nothing — but to have seen much more than eyes should ever suffer or see.

'Is it a man?' Daj cried out, pointing at him.

'No,' I said, 'it is Maram.'

I took note of the long, ruby firestone tucked beneath Maram's armpit. His hands, I saw, looked to have been burned even worse than the rest of him so that they could not grasp this heavy crystal. Brushed forward then, and so did everyone else. Maram fell into our arms. We carried him back to our tent; this proved no great feat as he must have weighed scarcely half what he had before the sun had stolen much of his water.

'Three and a half days!' Nuradayn marveled as he stood before our tent, looking inside. 'Who has ever heard of such a miracle?'

'All glory in the One,' Maidro said, staring at Maram. 'He should be dead.'

Sunji, looking on gravely, too, did not say what we were all thinking: that Maram was dead, and needed only a little more time before his heart stopped beating and his eyes closed forever.

'Vargh!' Maram said as I knelt beside him. 'Vargh!'

It took me a moment before I realized that he was trying to say my name.

Master Juwain and Liljana tried to get him to drink some water, but his tongue and throat were so parched that he could not swallow. And so Liljana moistened her fingers and touched them to his lips and tongue, which looked like a piece of blackened meat. She poured water directly over his body in the hope that his skin might absorb a little of it. Upon witnessing this waste, the four Avail who stood outside our tent shook their heads in silence.

'Vargh!' Maram said again. 'Sokki.'

Sokki, I thought, must mean, sorry.

These words came out like the croaking of a frog. His mouth and throat were too dry for him to speak intelligibly, but as Master Juwain and Liljana worked on him, he let loose a long series of grunts, barks, hisses and moans that I tried to make sense of. I slowly pieced together what had happened, and shook my head in wonder at his story:

Maram had indeed gone after the brandy, but had never reached this trove. When the storm had fallen upon him, in the blinding sand, he couldn't follow our old tracks and so had drifted off his course. After an hour or so of believing that he might stumble upon the brandy, he instead came upon a low rock. This saved him. He took shelter behind the rock, where he could catch his breath and wait out the storm, much as we had, too. Since he had brought no water with him, however, he grew very thirsty. By the time the storm ended, he could think of nothing except water. He knew that he should try to find his way back to our encampment, but the desert seemed featureless, an endless expanse of sun-baked sand, and he did not know which way he should strike out. He tried to gauge direction by the sun; he walked north, hoping that he hadn't wandered too far. He saw no landmark that looked like the rocks near our tents. He walked on and on beneath the killing sun until it grew so hot that he had to stop. Then, like a desert rat, he dug down into the sand and buried himself to wait out the worst of the heat. Thus he did not see us searching for him, nor hear us calling to him.

When he emerged from his hole, thirst had maddened him. Now, all that he desired to drink was brandy. He wandered, in hope of finding the seven bottles that Nuradayn had dropped into the sand. The unceasing sun deranged both his wits and his senses. The wool of his robe and shawl tormented his wounds and seemed as heavy as a covering of burning iron, and so he cast them off. He continued wandering, certain that he would find an entire lake filled with brandy. Once — in a moment of terrible lucidity — he realized that we would be searching for him. And so he had tried to unleash the fire from his crystal in order to signal us. He could not control the powerful red gelstei, however, and had succeeded only in burning his hands.

After that, only his craving for brandy had kept him from dropping down into the sand and dying. He fancied that the earth itself would tell him where to search for it. Sometime during the previous night, in the darkness before dawn, he had heard me calling to him and telling him that I had found the brandy. If only he could make his way back to me, he could have all the brandy that he could drink.

'Vraddi!' he croaked out as he lay inside the tent. 'Vraddi!'

I knew that he was calling for brandy, and I implored Master Juwain to wet his mouth with a little brandy from the last remaining bottle. Master Juwain did as I asked. The few drops that he poured down Maram's throat were all that Maram could drink.

'We cannot remain here any longer,' Sunji said to me from outside the tent. 'I know that your friend is dying, but — '

'There is still hope,' I said to him. I came out of the tent to stand beside him. 'You are right, though, that we cannot remain. If Estrella can find water, perhaps another cave where it is moist and cool, then Maram might yet live.'

The dark look in Sunji's eyes told me that he no longer had much hope of Estrella finding water and none at all that it would help Maram if she did.

After that we fashioned a litter from the tent and its poles, and placed Maram upon it. We covered him against the rising sun. A little more work sufficed to secure the litter to one of the pack-horses, who would drag it atilt across the sand.

Then we set out again toward the northwest. We were all so tired that we had to fight to keep from falling off our horses. Maidro announced that we had so little water left, we must forbear eating altogether. None of us, I thought, except perhaps Kane, had any appetite left. I couldn't think of food; in truth, I could hardly think of water. As we made our way miles farther into the glaring sands of the Tar Harath, all my attention concentrated on Maram. Bound to his litter and wrapped up like a mummy that remained somehow alive, he moved up one dune and down the next; from time to time, he would call out to us a single word: 'Vraddi!'

And then there came a time when he called out no more. Master Juwain dismounted and determined that Maram had fallen into the deep sleep that sometimes precedes the even deeper sleep of death.

'Even if Estrella can find water,' Sunji said to me as we crested one of the endless dunes, 'I don't think it will help Maram now.'

'I don't think the udra mazda will find water,' Maidro said. He sat on his wasted horse staring out at the sun-seared distances. 'It is growing only hotter, and the glare more hellish by the mile.'

Estrella, almost as weak as a newborn, found the strength to urge her horse onward, across the blazing sands. I followed her; I tried to follow my dimly-remembered sense that there was a union of opposites: good and evil; brightness and dark; moisture and drought.

Then we came up on top of another dune, and my urge to turn back from the fiery wasteland before us burned me like the kirax in my blood. I felt this urge to retreat flaring inside my compan- ions and the four Avari, as well. I was so tired, fevered and thirsty that I could barely see. It seemed that We were riding on and on into a wavering emptiness. The air was sick with flat; it seemed to bend the hellish light and distort it in strange ways. Mirages swirled in the distance and then vanished into nothingness.

Something powerful seized hold of me, as of a great hand wrapped around my spine. I knew that I had experienced this strange sensation before, but I could not quite remember where. And then Estrella pointed into the heart of the terrible brilliance ahead of us. In the shimmering light there, I thought could make out flashes of green that looked like trees.

'The sun has addled your wits,' Sunji said to me when I mentioned this. He squinted into the dazzling distances and shook his head. 'It is the madness that precedes sunstroke. We should pitch our tents and take shelter before it grows even hotter.'

I gazed down at Maram, bound to his litter, and I said, 'No, we must go on.'

It was Master Juwain who noticed the clouds above us: all puffy and white, and drifting in from the east, west and south toward a point just beyond the impossibly bright horizon.

'Strange,' Master Juwain murmured. 'How very strange!'

Liljana, who sat next to him on top of her exhausted horse, seemed to read his thoughts, and she said, 'Can it be that one of the Vilds lies here?'

At the look of puzzlement in Sunji's and Maidro's eyes, she told of the magic woods called Vilds that could be found at certain secret places in the world.

'You are all mad!' Sunji cried out. 'There cannot be such a hadrah at the heart of the Tar Harath!'

But then we forced ourselves to ride on another mile and crested yet another line of dunes. The air grew moist, as of a breeze off the sea. The shimmer out on the blinding sands suddenly fell from quicksilver to a bright and beautiful green.

'So,' Kane said. 'So.'

Now the veils of mirage finally parted to reveal an astonishing sight: great trees pushed their green crowns high above the desert's sands. And above this unbroken canopy hung thick layers of clouds rising up even higher into the sky. From the streaks of gray slanting downward toward the trees, it seemed that it must be raining.

'It cannot be,' Maidro murmured. 'It cannot be!'

He, and all of us, stared in wonder at the miles-wide forest in the middle of nowhere. His gaze fell upon Estrella, and he said, 'Bless the udra mazda!'

Sunji, Arthayn and Nuradayn all bowed their heads to Estrella, and so did I. Then Maidro nodded at me and added, 'Bless the Elahad, too. Without him, how would we have found the will to go on?'

The Avari seemed enraptured, even terrified, for although a few spindly trees grew in their hadrahs, they had never imagined anything like these lush, magnificent woods. Estrella smiled at them as if to say that the impossible was not only possible, but inevitable. Then she urged her horse forward, down toward the cool, abiding greenness of the Vild.