Black Jade

Chapter 34

The place that we had been seeking for so many days lay fifty miles to the northwest, across the Iona River — and somewhere below the mountains, to the east of Ghurlan but west of the Rhul River. Although this fit Master Matai's prediction, Maram objected to our new course, saying, 'But what if we find nothing there? We can't just go tramping from town to town forever on the basis of some horoscope that might, or might not be, the Maitreya's! Every time I see a carpenter sawing out a beam of wood, I wonder if he's making it just for me.'

He complained further that first we would have to cross the Iona and the road that King Arsu and his army were coming down.

'That's true,' I told him. 'And so the sooner we set out, the better our chance of avoiding them.'

We turned our cart onto a dirt track leading to the city of Assul. There, if the blacksmith was right, we would find a road running east to west, over the Black Bridge spanning the Iona and then on to Ghurlan. Jhamrul lay just to the north of this road, in the hills some forty miles before Ghurlan — or so we hoped.

We all, I thought, chafed at the slowness of our pace, set by our cart's grinding wheels. We considered unhitching Altaru from the cart for a wild dash to Jhamrul, and then out of Hesperu altogether, but this seemed too great a risk. And so we worked our way to Assul, a neat, quiet, little city. The road that the blacksmith had told of proved to be a ribbon of broken paving stones and patches of mud. My father never would have tolerated such dilapidation of a major road, but then he had never imagined that rebellion might tear his kingdom apart. As we moved across the rich bottomland closer to the Iona River, we encountered gangs of corvee laborers hard at work repairing the road. They swung their picks and lifted their shovels with a rare enthusiasm, as if taking great pride that they had been chosen to restore King Arsu's realm to greatness. One of these gangs struggled mightily, with ropes and teams of snorting mules, to erect a giant marble carving of Morjin off to the side of the road. I heard someone say that this statue would stand for ten thousand years; I prayed that it would sink into the soft, black loam as into quicksand, and vanish overnight into the bowels of the earth.

Other laborers, however, did not seem so happy. Close to the river, the Haralanders cultivated cotton and rice, and we passed swarms of men stripped nearly naked as sweat poured off their bodies and they bent down in the bog-like fields hoeing and pulling up weeds. Many were slaves, and quite a few of these had been brought down from Surrapam, branded and bound in chains. The hot Hesperu sun burnt their fair skins raw and bloody. More than a lew serfs worked spreading dung in these fields, too. Their masters seemed to whip them as ferociously as they did their slaves.

It seemed to me that nearly everyone in Hesperu, from the lowliest gong farmer to the King, was a slave of some sort, for they all made obeisance to Morjin — and to each other. In Ramlan, I had heard a saying: 'Every man has a master.' It seemed a perfect expression of the degradation of people all through the Dragon Kingdoms. In this land of crosses and carvings of monsters, everyone in principle was bound to someone else. And now, according to King Arsu's edicts, many of them had to bow to a new class of masters. The Haralanders called them 'New Lords', and these were mostly common men such as the bookseller and cooper in Nubur who had enriched themselves on the dragongild, and with the Kallimun's blessing, purchased their titles from the King. It was one of these New Lords, a Lord Rodas, who stopped us on the rundown Ghurlan road just as we were about to cross the Black Bridge over the turbid waters of the Iona River.

Lord Rodas was a small, thin-faced man whose scraggly beard did not make up for his lack of chin. He wore silk pantaloons and a blue silk doublet embroidered with gold. The six hirelings accompanying him were richly attired in a purple and yellow livery, and they bore lances and swords but no armor. They waited on horseback as Lord Rodas positioned his gray gelding in the middle of the road, blocking our cart.

'Greetings, my good players,' he said to us.

As he informed us in a voice as smooth as safflower oil, all traveling troupes in the Haraland between the Iona River and the Rhul had come under his command.

'And it is my command,' he informed us, 'that you are not to cross this bridge until you've paid me a levy of forty silver ounces.'

I glanced at Kane, on top of the packhorse we had converted to a mount. His eyes were pools of fire. I did not think that either Lord Rodas or his six hirelings had any idea how close they were to death.

Despite Lord Rodas' weak appearance, he had a great strength of stubbornness, and Liljana was able to bargain him down only a little, to a squeeze of thirty silver pieces — the last of our money.

'I can only think,' he told us, 'that it will go harder for you in the west. There, Lord Olum has taken charge of all troupes. You'll only have to pay him another levy, and a stiffer one at that. Well, be on your way then, before I change my mind — the mercy of the Dragon be with you!'

He moved his horse aside and rudely waved us by. As we rolled past him, I overheard him complaining to one of his hirelings about this Lord Olum; it seemed that Lord Rodas and his men planned to intercept King Arsu and his army when they came down the Iona road so as to denounce Lord Olum for making the grave error of holding back the levies that he collected, and thus cheating the King.

On the other side of the river, on the road that led down from Avrian through Orun, we saw no sign of the King's vanguard, and we gave thanks for that. Neither Lord Olum nor anyone claiming to act in his stead stopped us to demand money, and we were grateful for that as well. Quickly, we made our way through rice bogs and cotton patches, which soon gave way to fields of millet and maize. The weather held clear, and we made a good distance that day, despite the potholes in the crumbling road.

For two days after that, we followed this road west toward Ghurlan. It climbed gradually up into a country of low hills covered with ginseng, chicory and poppies — and groves of almond trees and pecans. The air grew less close and humid, and slightly | cooler. About thirty-five miles from the Iona, a farmer pointed us toward a dirt road cutting off north through these hills. He told us that if we drove our cart up the road for another five miles past Hagberry Hill, we would come to Jhamrul. His directions proved true, and we found the long-sought village nestled in a wooded notch.

There was little to it: some forty houses and other buildings surrounded by almond and pecan groves, and fields of red wheat growing on the hills' terraces. It seemed impossible that we could simply go down into this pretty place and ask after the Maitreya, but this is what we did. Or rather, we made our way into the village square, where we asked the blacksmith if Jhamrul had any healers who might be able to help us. The blacksmith directed us to the house of Jhamrul's only healer — indeed, the only healer for miles about, for apparently the nearby villages of Sojun, Eslu and Nur also sent their sick and injured to this renowned man. His name was Mangus, but it seemed that the village folk referred to him more reverentially as the Master.

We found his house to the north of the village on the side of a hill; it was built of good, gray granite instead of the mud bricks more common in Hesperuk constructions. As we rolled up the lane fronting the house, we saw an old woman, a slave, working in the herb garden to its side. On the other side, fig trees grew, while behind it, a dark-haired man stood in a pasture tending some goats. The house itself was a good size, with sweeping, red-tiled roofs covering its four sections. The front doors — wide enough to drive our cart through? stood open to reveal a courtyard with roses growing on white trellises and a mossy fountain at its center. Another old woman waited by these doors to greet us. She, however, could not be mistaken for a slave, for she wore a fine silk robe embroidered with flowers and a necklace of opals and black onyx. She gave her name as Zhor, and she told us that she was Mangus's wife.

I glanced at Master Juwain as I tried to hide my chagrin; unless Mangus had married forty years beyond his age, he could not be the one we sought. If Master Matai's astrological calculations proved true, the Maitreya would have been bom, as I was, on the ninth of Triolet in the year 279m and would therefore be only twenty-two years old.

Zhor invited us inside the atrium while a servant went to summon Mangus. With her own hand, she picked up a large urn and poured us glasses of lemon squash, sweetened with mint and honey. As we waited by the burbling water of the fountain, I noted a pedestal holding up a marble bust of Morjin. Its eyes stared upward; following their blind gaze I saw above the arch of the doorway behind us, almost too high to read, a gold-trimmed scroll listing in an elegant, red-inked script the steps that one must take to walk the Way of the Dragon:

RIGHT UNDERSTANDING

RIGHT THOUGHT

RIGHT SPEECH

RIGHT DEED

RIGHT REVERANCE

RIGHT SUBMISSION

As I was brooding over ail the ways that Morjin had perverted what should have been noble virtues, in his Darakul Elu — and in pain and blood — the 'Master' came into the atrium. He glided toward us as if buoyed within an air of great dignity. His white hair hung in perfectly oiled curls about his shoulders. He wore a tunic of red silk and red pantaloons, and a longer outer robe of white cotton that draped down to his silver slippers. I noticed a few, faint pinkish stains that it seemed his servants had been unable to wash out of it. His cleanly shaved, stern face, which shone with kindness and concern, reminded me of my grandfather's. As well, I liked his eyes, which shone with kindness and concern. But his eyes held the same cloud of suspicion that I had seen too often since we had come into Hesperu.

We made our presentations, and told him of our concern for Atara's blindness and the wound on Maram's chest that would not be healed; we paid him what little silver we had gained in a performance on the road. Then he led Atara, Maram and me into a small room off the atrium. White tiles covered this chamber's floor and walls, and it smelled of mint and old herbs, as well as blood. Old blood stains, I saw, marred the grain of the wooden chair at the center of the room, as well as a table near one of the walls. Mangus invited Atara to sit down in the chair, while Maram pulled off his tunic and stretched out on the table.

When Mangus unwrapped the bandage from around Atara's face, I felt my heart beating more quickly to the rhythm of Mangus's pounding pulse. My throat burned as Mangus drew in a deep breath of air. For a moment, a surging hope built inside me. I wondered if Master Matai might have been wrong, and the one we sought was really an old man after all.

But Mangus only stared sadly at Atara and said to her. 'I'm sorry, Kalinda, but I cannot help you. I know of no one who can. Except, of course, the Maitreya. I have heard that Lord Morjin might be coming to Hesperu. Perhaps you should seek him out. If he were to lay his hands upon your face, to touch his fingers beneath your brows, then — '

'Thank you,' Atara said to Mangus as her whole body stiffened. The coldness that came into her nearly froze the blood in my heart. 'I had hoped that you might be able to heal me, but I thank you for your suggestion. If it is my fate, I shall certainly seek out the Red Dragon.'

Mangus sighed at Atara's obvious distress, and bowed his head to her. Then he sighed again before stepping over to Maram. It did not take him long to get Maram's bandage off and unpack the layers of cotton stuffed down into the single remaining wound in Maram's chest. Although he kept his face hard and expressionless, I felt his churning disgust at the sight of this raw, oozing opening that Jezi Yaga had torn into Maram. The bloody, stinking bandages he cast into a bronze basin. He rested his old hand on the other half of Maram's thickly-haired chest, and asked him, 'You say your horse bit you here nearly three months ago? Have you tried setting maggots to the wound?'

Maram's eyes rolled upward. He said, 'On the road some miles back we met, ah, a healer who advised me that maggots would clean the wound. The damn worms burned me sorely, but didn't help.'

Mangus smiled at Maram, then told him, 'Once, a soldier was brought to me — Sefu was his name. He had carried an arrowpoint in his lung for nearly three years. It was said that sixty-seven pots of pus had been drained from him. Although I was unable to draw the arrowpoint, I made a plaster for the wound. After a month, it began to close, and after two more, it healed successfully, though Sefu complained that he could still feel the arrow's steel when he breathed too deeply.'

At that point, I slipped these words out: 'We had heard that you cured a girl of an incurable wasting disease.'

Something moved inside of Mangus as if he had swallowed a live worm. His sad smile, I thought, hid a great deal. He gazed out the window at the pasture; he seemed deep in contemplation. Then he walked over to the open window, cupped his hands around his mouth and cried out, 'Bemossed! I have need of you!'

He turned back toward us. He glanced at Maram and said, 'I must be alone with Garath now.'

A few moments later, as Atara and I were making our way toward the door, a young man rushed into the room. The looseness of his rough wool tunic did little to conceal his slender, sun-browned limbs and what appeared to be whip scars seaming the flesh of his upper back around his neck. He was tall for a Hesperuk, and comely, with rather soft features and a gentle-looking face. A black cross had been tattooed into his forehead above the space between, his eyes. His eyes. I noticed, were of a deep umber color and as large and luminous as any eyes I had ever seen.

'Bemossed,' Mangus commanded his slave. He pointed at the foul bandages in the basin. 'Dispose of these. Then go out to the pasture and kill me a goat, that we might make sacrifice.'

Bemossed bowed to Mangus, and picked up the basin. He exited the chamber without a glance at anyone. We left Maram to Mangus's dubious ministrations, then followed Bemossed into the atrium, where we waited as he left the house by way of the rear door. A short while later, the scream of a goat broke the atrium's peace. Not even the tinkling fountain could drown out this terrible sound.

Mangus's wife poured us more of our lemony refreshment, but I could not bring myself to drink it. She told us that she had other duties to attend to, and excused herself, leaving us to ourselves. I waited, staring at the bust of Morjin as I wondered why Mangus had needed to be alone with Maram. Soon Bemossed returned, bearing a large bronze urn. Its contents sloshed against its sides as he moved through the atrium, and I smelled fresh blood. Then he went into his master's healing chamber, and shut the door behind him.

The tang of the lemons wafting into the air nearly sickened me. I looked over the rim of my glass at Liljana and Master Juwain, who were staring at Estrella. She sat on a stone bench near the fountain gazing with great intensity at the chamber's closed door. Her dark, liquid eyes rippled with little lights like quicksilver. Then her face came alive with a burning radiance as if a bolt of lightning had split the air above her. She jumped up from her bench. She looked at Daj as her fingers began fluttering as quickly as a hummingbird's wings. She looked at me. She fairly danced over to me, and took hold of my hand, gently pulling at me. Again, she stared at the closed door to the chamber into which Bemossed had disappeared. I almost couldn't bear the bright bursts of blood I felt pulsing out of her racing heart. I couldn't bear the brightness of her eyes, for in these twin pools of delight, I saw all her wonder and burning hope for the slave called Bemossed.

'He?' I said to Estrella. 'This one — are you sure?'

Estrella smiled, all warm and brilliant like the sun, and she quickly nodded her head. A dying scryer had once told me that she would show me the Maitreya; now that the moment had finally come, I almost couldn't believe it.

'So,' Kane said coming over to lay his hand on Estrella's head.

'So.' Master Juwain muttered something about wanting to know the

day and hour of Bemossed's birth, while Atara stood icily still

within a strange silence. Daj said. But he looks just Hke everyone

else! What should we do now?'

His question, I thought was very much to the point. There seemed nothing to do but wait, and so wait we did, I listened to the water splashing in the fountain drop by drop, and felt Estrella's hand gripping mine excitedly as a new life coursed through her veins. Kane's unfathomable eyes fixed on the door. If a dragon had burst into the atrium just then, Kane would have tried to fight it back with his bare hands. And yet I felt a deep doubt eating at him, too.

At last the door opened, and Mangus came out, followed by Maram and Bemossed. My eyes quickly took in Bemossed's curly black hair and neatly trimmed beard. He bore the same bronze basin, now full of more wads of stained cotton and blood. His motions were light and quick, yet sure, and he hastened out of the atrium as he had before. I wanted to stop and question him, but there seemed no way to do this gracefully.

Mangus cast no more light on the mystery of this man. All he said to us was: 'Garath's plaster will need to be changed tomorrow. And on the day following. After that, you may be on your way, wherever you are bound.'

He bowed to us, and then showed us to the front door. We left his house as we had come, driving the cart down the lane that led back to the village. When we had gone half a mile, I stopped the cart by a pasture full of sheep and looked at Maram. He sat on his horse, with his hand lightly pressed to his chest.

'Tell me what happened to you!' I said to him.

'Tell you?' he said. His gaze fell upon Estrella, who sat with me on the seat of the cart. 'Tell me! You all look as if you ate morning glory seeds and stared too long at the sun.'

I explained to him that our quest might very well have come to an end. And then he recounted what had happened in the closed chamber with Mangus and Bemossed: 'I couldn't see very much because Mangus covered my face with a cloth: it was of silk, thick and yellow and emblazoned with a Red Dragon. And fairly soaked in some perfume. Strange, I thought, very strange. But Mangus told me that I should meditate beneath the Dragon's protection.. Meditate! He told me that he must wash my wound with medicines. The cloth, he said, would protect me from their stench. It helped, I suppose, but only a little. I don't know what that damned quack packed the poultice with. But I smelled spirits and peppermint oil, and sandalwood, too, I think. And something really foul. And — I'm loathe to believe this, Val — that stinking goat's blood.'

Maram pushed his hand down beneath the collar of his tunic as if intending to rip off the bandages bound to his chest. But Master Juwain nudged his horse up close to Maram and said, 'No, leave it be. Let us wait a few days to see if the poultice actually helps. Perhaps Mangus is not as much of a quack as you fear.'

'But what would he want with an animal's blood?'

I turned to open the cart's front door, behind my seat. After looking about at the nearby houses and pasture to see if anyone might be watching us, I pulled out my scabbarded sword. I drew Alkaladur, then pointed it back up the hill toward Mangus's house. The blade flared a soft glorre.

'The blood was used to purify,' I said with a sudden sureness. 'To purify me?' Maram said, shuddering.

'No,' I told him. 'Don't you remember Argattha? I heard one of the priests there speak of sacrificing virgins … for their blood. Blood washes clean, as the Kallimun says, yes? But I don't suppose Mangus finds virgins so easy to come by, and so he has to slay innocent goats instead.'

Maram's hand worked beneath his tunic as the light of understanding filled his eyes. 'That slave, then? The one Estrella believes to be the — '

'He is the Maitreya,' I said softly. 'He must be.'

'But, Val, the mark — the black cross! How could fate be so cruel as to make the Maitreya a damned Hajarim?' I smiled grimly as I sheathed my sword. The Hajarim of Hesperu and the other Dragon Kingdoms, I thought, were truly damned, for no other orders of humanity — not even murderers or slaves taken in war — were treated so vilely. Most people loathed them as they did blowflies. Hajarim were born of Hajarim, and so it had been for ages, far back into the mists of time. No one knew their origins. But too many agreed that the Hajarim must perform the lowliest and most hated of tasks: gong farming and cleaning stables and streets; slaughtering animals, butchering their meat and tanning their hides. The Hajarim handled the dead. Not all the Hajarim were slaves, and not all slaves were Hajarim, particularly in Hesperu, with so many ships packed with men arriving from Surrapam. Slave or free, however, whatever 'free' still meant, the Hajarim were forbidden even to brush against the garments of others or let their exhalations fall too near their faces. Above all, they must never touch their hands to another's person.

'That slave did touch me,' Maram said. 'At least, I think he did. Someone laid a hand upon my wound I it didn't feel like an old man's hand.'

His great body shuddered, and he turned to look back up at Mangus's house.

'You, too, then?' I asked him. 'Everyone here hates the Hajarim.'

Maram's face soured as he said, 'It doesn't bother me that! Bemossed is Hajarim. But that he washed his hands in blood before laying them upon me — that vexes me sorely.'

'But how else to clean,' Atara asked him, 'the uncleanable?'

I thought of the black cross that blighted Bemossed's forehead; all Hajarim babies were marked thus at birth, an ineradicable sign of their error in even being born.

'I don't think we should concern ourselves with the rites of these Hesperuks,' Master Juwain said. 'No blood, a goat's or a virgin's, is going to do very much toward healing Maram's wound. But the Maitreya might. Let us see if we can find out more about this Bemossed.'

Toward this end, we returned to the village and set up in the square for a show. We waited some hours for the word of our performance to spread to the outlying farms, and even to the nearby village of Nur. At dusk, with many curious people packing the square, we donned our costumes as we had a dozen times before. Kane broke his chain, and Alphanderry sang. Atara told several young women that they would find love and happiness. And Maram made the women, men and children laugh. Afterwards, a fletcher and a barber vied for the dubious honor of sharing conversation and spirits with Garath the Fool. Maram matched these men in a drinkfest, one cup of brandy following another until tongues loosened and words began to flow. But Maram, being Maram, kept his wits about him while the two men spoke much more freely than they should have. It was nearly midnight when Maram staggered back to where we had made camp in a fallow wheatfield at the edge of the village. Despite the late hour we gathered around a little fire to sip some tea and compare stories.

'Ah, perhaps Bemossed is the one we've been seeking,' Maram said to us. He belched up a burble of brandy. 'The very, very one.'

From what Maram had learned from his inebriated new "friends, and Atara during her fortune telling — and the rest of us in various conversations with seamstresses, cobblers and the like — we pieced together a little about Bemossed: He had been born in the north near Avrian and separated from his parents at an early age. After being sold and resold numerous times, he had finally run away from a cruel master, a leather-seller named Chadu. But Chadu had recaptured him, and despite custom, had whipped him, nearly stripping the meat from his bones. Alter that Bemossed would not do any work for Chadu, refusing even to lift a broom to sweep the floors of Chadus house. Chadu threatened to strangle him, but Bemossed told him that he would not carry out any more of Chadu's commands. And so in disgust, Chadu had journeyed to Jhamrul, where he had heard that a healer had need of a Hajarim to dispose of bandages, amputated limbs and perform other filthy tasks. And so, seven years previously, Mangus had bought Bemossed and put him to work.

'I heard,' Atara said, 'that a great lord brought his dying daughter here. That the girl was coughing out her lungs with consumption. I don't think Mangus could have cured that with his medicines. Perhaps Bemossed — '

'The barber also told me of that lord and his child,' Maram said, interrupting her. 'Apparently, the lord wouldn't leave her alone with an old man and a Hajarim. So he must have seen Bemossed laying his hands upon her. But no one speaks of it openly.'

Bemossed's talent for healing, it seemed, was a secret that was no real secret.

'But they do speak of it,' Maram said. 'They call Mangus "The Master", but they know the truth. And it can't be long, I think, before others outside the village will know, too. The barber told me that only a few months ago, the Kallimun sent a man down from Kharun to question Mangus. I'm sure that damn priest went away with his purse full of gold — they say that no one is more faithful in paying the weregild than Mangus.'

I laid my hand on Maram's shoulder. I can only hope that the villagers will come to speak of how Mangus healed Garath the Fool. 'Is your wound any better?'

'All of my wounds, inside and out, are better when I've had a little drink,' Maram said, rubbing his chest. 'Who needs the Maitreya when you have brandy, eh? But no, it's not really better — not as when Master Juwain healed Atara with his crystal.'

Master Juwain sat holding his mug of tea in both hands; he had long since put away his emerald varistei — I hoped not forever.

'I can only pray your wound will heal now, too,' Master Juwain said to Maram. 'But if it doesn't, that is no proof that Bemossed is not the Maitreya. As we say: "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,'"

I thought about all that had befallen since I had mistakenly claimed to be who I could never be. Then I said, 'Proof that he is not the Maitreya might be neither pleasant nor easy to come by.'

'I'm more interested in proof that he is the Maitreya,' Master Juwain said. 'Or at least good evidence.'

At this, I looked at Estrella, and so did Kane and Maram. She sat gazing at the fire as if she hadn't heard a word we had spoken. Her face fairly gleamed with a deep and splendid light.

'What better evidence than that?' I asked Master Juwain.

'Perhaps no better evidence,' Master Juwain admitted as he looked at her. 'But I should like some objective evidence.'

I nodded my head at this. Once, I had been wrong in this matter, and must never be again.

'If only,' Master Juwain said, 'we could discover exactly where Bemossed was born, and when.'

I thought about this too, and then I said, 'I doubt if any of the villagers can tell us that. But Bemossed himself might know. Why don't I try to talk to him tomorrow?'

'Ah, and what then?' Maram asked. 'Suppose that he confirms Master Matai's calculations, down to the minute of his birth? What shall we do then?'

I gazed at the orange flames of the fire, and I said, 'Everyone wants to join a traveling troupe, yes? Why don't we invite Bemossed to run off with us?'

We went to bed after that, but I couldn't sleep. I kept going over in my mind all that I wanted to ask Bemossed, and more, all that my heart most deeply desired from him. Could he truly be the one we sought, I wondered? For more than a year, I had schemed and fought to reach this place, but never with a very good idea of what might happen next. My last thought before trying to meditate was that we had met the Maitreya — perhaps — and now we must keep him. from the Kallimun and Morjin.