Black Jade

Chapter 42

We rode only a couple of hours after that, for we were all exhausted and the ground soon grew even hillier and more rocky. We wanted, though, to place a good few miles between us and the cottage in case any of the Red Capes did return. We finally made camp in a cluster of rocks above a stream flowing down from the mountains. Although the ground was almost too hard for sleeping, sleep we all did — all of us except Kane. He stood guard over us with his bow strung, watching the moonlit swells of ground below us. But nobody pursued us that night, not even in our dreams.

When morning came, the sun rose in the east, all golden and glorious. So, it seemed, with Bemossed. He moved with a new purpose, and he smiled more, as if all that he looked upon pleased him. His eyes shone with a new light. In the coming days, I looked for it to fade, but it did not.

Just before we set out for the secret pass, as Master Juwain was changing the dressing of the wound in Maram's chest that had never healed, Bemossed came over to Maram. He set his hand directly upon the raw, red wound, and Maram cried out as the salts of Bemossed's skin burned him. Bemossed left his hand there even so, for a long time. And when he took it away, Maram's flesh had been made whole again.

'Oh — oh, my Lord!' Maram shouted, pushing out his chest to the sky. 'I am healed!'

He hugged Bemossed to him in a crushing embrace, and then began dancing about the rocks half-naked. He whooped for joy, and then said to Bemossed, 'You are the Maitreya, truly you are, and nothing is impossible now!'

This, however, proved not to be so. Bemossed proceeded to lay his hands over Atara's face and then Estrella's throat. But even after an hour of great effort, Estrella still could not find words to speak, and Atara's eye hollows remained empty.

'I'm sorry,' Bemossed said to Atara. He bowed his head to Estrella. 'I've failed you.'

Despite Atara's disappointment, she clasped his hand and told him, 'You could never fail me. There must be many things beyond the power even of a Maitreya.'

She smiled at him, sadly and wistfully, and yet with great gladness, too. She seemed happier than she had been in a long time.

'What could be beyond the power of the Shining One?' Maram exulted as he thumped his chest and gazed at Bemossed. 'The perfect power of a perfect, perfect man!'

Bemossed blinked his dark eyes as his lips tightened with anger. He said to Maram, 'Whatever power passes through me might be perfect, but I certainly am not.'

Maram, though, only waved his hand at the sunlit rocks and the green grass all about us, and said, 'Today, everything is perfect!'

Bemossed rolled his eyes in exasperation, and couldn't help smiling at him. Then turned to me and said, 'You understand, don't you?'

I gazed at him, and his face gleamed with all his kindness, goodness and his bright, soaring spirit. But the deep light that filled him now also illumined his restlessness, obstinacy and his anguish of life — and all his other flaws. And the more brilliantly it shone, the clearer and sharper these flaws seemed to be.

'Give it time,' I said to him, clapping him on his shoulder. I looked from Atara to Estrella. 'My brother, Asaru, was the finest knight Mesh has ever seen, but even he didn't learn to wield a sword all in one day.'

Bemossed considered this. It was strange, I thought, that even in the depths of a dark, brooding silence, something inside him seemed to sing with light.

'Val is right,' Master Juwain said, coming up to Bemossed. 'All that I have read about the Maitreya leads me to believe that his gift must be trained like that of any other man.'

Bemossed nodded his head as his face brightened once again. 'All right, then let us leave this land and go where I might find such training.'

After that, we saddled our horses and rode until we entered the band of forest beyond the pasture country. We saw no sign of Red Capes hunting us, or indeed, of anyone. Birds sang out from the trees in abundance, and deer browsed on the bushes, but if any people had ever dwelt here, they had many years since fled for other places. We made our way through the rugged, rising hills toward the pass that Atuan had told of. We found it only with difficulty: a sharp and treacherous break in the mountains that was more of a crack splitting naked rock than a true pass. We had to work our way through it walking our horses in single file. It snaked north and east, and it took all our care to negotiate it without any of our horses — or us — stumbling and breaking a leg. Finally, though, after a long, hard work, we came out into the great bowl of lowland where we once again looked upon the city of Senta. Great, jagged peaks rose up in a ring of white for miles around us.

Maram gazed out at the wheatfields to the south of Senta's houses and buildings, at the rocky prominence called Mount Miru. There, the opening of the Singing Caves led down into the earth. He told me, 'I would look upon this marvel. I would hear the angels sing.'

But this, too, was not to be. We held council, and we decided that going into the caverns once again might prove too dangerous.

'So,' Kane said, 'King Yulmar might not welcome us, since we left a slaughter on the caverns' doorstep the last time we came this way.'

Liljana nodded her head and added, 'We must do all that we can to slip past Senta without alerting the Kallimun's priests or their spies.'

'But we defeated the Kallimun — again!' Maram said. 'And killed the greatest monster that Morjin ever sent after us! We vanquished the Tar Harath, to say nothing of Jezi Yaga or the Skadarak. And we found the Lord of Light! We should go into the caverns to sing of our deeds!'

'Didn't you tell me,' I said to him, 'that you never wanted to go down into the earth again?'

'Ah, well, I suppose I did,' he said. He looked at Bemossed. 'But that was then.'

In the end, however, Maram saw the reason of our arguments, and he grudgingly accepted the need for prudence. It was, as he said, the greatest disappointments of his life. It consoled him somewhat that he had Alphanderry the greatest minstrel of the age, to sing for him in the caverns' stead.

'I'll come back,' he promised himself, looking up at Mount Miru.

'Someday, Morjin will be finally and utterly defeated and I'll come back and make a true pilgrimage here.'

We spent most of that day crossing the tiny kingdom of Senta, or rather, skirting it, for we rode in a great circle around Senta's farmland and forests, keeping close to the mountains. We encoun-tered only a woodcutter and a few farmers, who gave us leave to cross their fields. At the end of the day, we made camp m a wood northeast of the city, just below the pyramid mountain that had pointed our way toward Senta. We spent the next morning working our way up through the pass around this icy peak, and so we left the civilized realms of Ea's far west behind us.

We came down into the thick forest of that wild upland where no people lived. For the rest of that day and part of the next, we picked our way with great care ever downward, searching through the trees and huge rocks for the road by which we had approached Senta. Kane had an excellent memory for terrain, and so did I. and so we had no trouble finding this road, in its broken segments, or the long valley through which it led. The Valley of Death, Maram called it, for it disquieted him to wonder what had happened to the people who had once lived here. But as before, on our journey toward Hesperu, this broad, green swath through the earth proved to be just the opposite, for we took from it ripe apples and wild, golden wheat, as well as antelopes and boar and other game that sustained our lives.

It was here, during the warm, sunny days of early Ioj, that Bemossed finally learned to ride. Here, too, he began putting to the test whether we had truly dealt Morjin a significant defeat. Day after day. as we rode down the grass-filled valley, he would gaze out at the rocks and the golden-leaved aspen trees as if looking for the Lightstone's radiance in all things. Twice, as during the battle with Morjins droghul. I saw the Lightstone appear and Bemossed reach out to grasp it. He seemed still to lack the power to make it his own and wield it as he had been born to do. We all however, felt a change in our gelstei: Maram's firestone cooled to the temperature of warm bread while Atara found her kristei to be suddenly lighter and almost free of taint — and so with our other crystals. We all dared to hope that Morjin might be losing his power over them.

After twelve days of easy travel the valley grew drier as we approached the canyon that gave out onto the Red Desert. None of us wanted to recross this wasteland. Maram, especially, sought for arguments to put oft this passage or avoid it altogether.

'But Bemossed is making such excellent progress here!' Maram said to us. 'If we go into the desert, he'll have to light the dreadful heat, and so he won't have the wherewithal to fight Morjin.'

'But we can't just remain in this valley forever,' Liljana told him.

'Why not? There is enough game to feed us forever — and wild wheat that could be brewed into a good beer.'

Liljana, I thought, almost smiled at this. Then she said to him. 'But I haven't seen any grapes from which we could make wine, and so brandy. And courtesans there are none.'

Maram considered this. 'But we could at least wait until Ashvar, couldn't we? Or even Valte, when the desert grows a little cooler?'

'The desert must be cooler now than it was in Marud,' I told him. 'We must cross it as soon as we can, and you know why.'

At this, Maram raised up his hands in surrender, and said, 'All right, my friend, but if I die of heatstroke in the Tar Harath, you'll never forgive yourself.'

The next afternoon, we came down into the Dead City, half buried in the desert's swirling, reddish sands. Hundreds of miles of emptiness opened before us, to the north and east. Here grew a little ursage, rock grass and other tough plants. It was said to rain here in Segadar and the other months of winter, but we would be unlikely to see any moisture fall from the sky unless Estrella worked her magic again.

For three days, we rode east, taking water from the Yieshi wells that we came to. We saw no men or women of this tribe, not even at the easternmost well where Manoj and his family had dwelt with their little black tents and stinking goats. We speculated that he might have gone off to make war with the Zuri, but we didn't really know. We filled our waterskins almost to bursting from his well, still nearly full from the storm that Estrella had summoned. We left no coins to pay for it. As Atara reminded us, we had given the Yieshi a great deal of water, which in the desert was a hundred times more valuable than gold.

After that, we went into the Tar Harath. This immense country of sun-scorched rocks and blazing dunes proved to be not so hellishly hot as Maram had feared — which is to say that the torrid air did not quite sear our lungs or steam the flesh from our bones. But the days waxed more than hot enough to make us sweat and swear and suffer. Somehow, we bore it. Maram, who had ventured this journey in the opposite direction alone, found the grace to remark that our companionship made the miles and the days pass more easily. Then, too, as he put it with his wounds healed, he had only to endure a more or less human measure of pain.

This grew greater and greater the deeper that we pushed into the Tar Harath. Miracles we had found in abundance all along our way, but we had no magic to keep the sun from sucking the moisture from our bodies and emptying our waterskins a little more with every passing mile. Finally, our water ran out altogether. Then Estrella took out the blue bowl that Oni had given her, and she tried to call the clouds to her from out of nowhere. She failed. We were never able to determine exactly why. Some things, it seemed, especially the ways of the wind and the human heart, would always remain a mystery.

We might have despaired then, but we did not. I reminded Maram, and myself, that on our outward passage Estrella had led us to the Vild, and she would again. So it proved to be. Our course across the drifting desert sands had held straight and true, and less than a day later we came upon the giant oak trees and olindas that grew by the greatest of magics in the middle of a wasteland. And so we entered the Loikalii's wood, parched and dust-worn but still gloriously alive.

When Maira, with Anneli and others of her small people, came to greet us, she called out in delight: 'The seekers return! With the bright one they sought! We must make a feast!'

It took two days of eating and drinking for us to consume all the succulent fruits, nuts, wines and other things that the Loikalii brought to us from their fecund woods. We rested as much as we wished, and then arose to eat, drink and sing some more. I unpacked a bottle of old brandy, bought in Hesperu, that I had been saving for many miles. As I had promised Maram, I filled our cups with this marvelous liquid, and made a toast to love. Toward the end of bringing more love into the world, Maram renewed his acquaintance with Anneli, who wanted again and again to hear the story of how Bemossed had healed his unhealable wound. At last, on the third day of our sojourn, we all gathered around Oni's magic pool that she called the Water. Bemossed had a hard time believing that I had fallen into it, only to emerge onto the banks of another much like it on another world. As we stood over it looking down into its still, silvery waters, I said to him, 'Why don't we put it to the test? Why don't you dive in and see what you can see?'

Just then the amethyst towers and golden buildings of the city called Iveram appeared from out of the pool's shimmering water. Bemossed gasped at the wonder of it, and he said, 'No, thank you — I am a man of this world.'

He planted his feet on the bank of the pool and grabbed hold of my arm to steady himself, and he stared in amazement as the faces and forms of the Star People came into view. I recognized the noble Ramadar, Eva, Varjan and others of the true Valari whom I had met on their world of Givene. No words did they speak, nor could any common language pass through the water that connected our two worlds, or so I thought. I knew, however, that the Star People recognized Bemossed for who he was. Their black, brilliant eyes blazed with great rejoicing.

And then the pool shimmered like silustria, and the Star People disappeared from our sight. Through the clear water other things took shape: the great, golden astor tree, Irdrasil, and the two perfect white mountains, Telshar and Vayu that framed it in the distance. Although the Galadin of Agathad did not make themselves visible to us, I had a sense that Ashtoreth and Valoreth — and others of their order — were aware of much that occurred on Ea, and elsewhere. If they had faces like other men and women, they surely smiled to behold Bemossed and know that all of Eluru had a new Lord of light.

After a while, the pool's radiance dimmed and its surface quieted to a sheeny silver, like that of any other still water. The Loikalii, in awe of what they had seen, turned toward Bemossed and began clapping their hands as they chanted: 'A song! A song — give us a song!'

At this, Bemossed seemed genuinely embarrassed. He said, 'I never learned many, and none worthy of such a wonder.'

Then Alphanderry came forth out of nothingness, and walked up to him. He smiled at him and said, 'Hoy, I have songs! Thousands upon thousands! If you'll give me a few notes, I shall give one to you.'

As Estrella and I took out our flutes and Kane his mandolet — and the Loikalii sucked on ripe apples or plums to prepare their throats for a songfest — Alphanderry stood by the pool looking at Bemossed strangely. And then he began singing out old verses beloved of Master Juwain and the rest of us:

When earth alights the Golden Band,

The darkest age will pass away:

When angel fire illumes the land,

The stars will show the brightest day.

The deathless day, the Age of Light;

Ieldra's blaze befalls the earth;

The end of war, the end of night

Awaits the last Maitreya 's birth.

The Cup of Heaven in his hands,

The One's clear light in heart and eye,

He brings the healing of the land,

And opens colors in the sky.

And there, the stars, the ageless lights

For which we ache and dream and burn,

Upon the deep and dazzling heights -

Our ancient home we shall return.

The Loikalii learned most of these words, the music too, with a single recitation, for such was their gift. They insisted on singing the verses again — and again — thrice more, until they had them perfect. Then Maira arose from the grass and said to Alphanderry, 'You bring words that echo our dreams.'

'How not?' Alphanderry said. 'I am of the Forest, am I not?' Maira smiled at this and turned to Bemossed. 'And you — we hope, we hope! — will bring the fire that heals.'

For a moment, Bemossed's eyes grew troubled as if he stared down into a dark place. Then this mood melted away before the blaze of his design. Although I sensed in him little vanity or arrogance, he also had little patience for pretended humility. Now that he knew with a surety who and what he was, he seemed to accept this with all the naturalness of a flower opening its petals to the sky.

'What I bring already is,' he said to Maira. 'The fire you speak of is spread upon the earth, but people do not see it.' 'Then you will help them to see,' Maira told him. At this, Bemossed smiled sadly as he looked at Atara. 'You will, you will,' Maira said. 'And when everyone sees the world as it really is, the world will never be the same.'

Later that morning we said goodbye to Maira and the Loikalii. Oni promised to send cooling winds from out of the northwest, and so it proved to be. After we had left the woods to make our way across the drifts of red-tinged sand, we followed this steady wind, or rather it followed us. Although the days never grew really cool, as with a bright Valte afternoon in the mountains of Mesh, we found ourselves able to travel straight through from dawn to dusk. Even the heat of high noon seemed sweetly hot, as if the sun's rays penetrated our garments and flesh to fill our bodies with an ease of being and a love of light.

The sheer brilliance of the deep desert dazzled all of us. During the long hours of the days, the sand scattered the sunlight up into a perfectly blue sky. And at night, the stars came out in all their shimmering millions. Bemossed seemed almost wholly ignorant of astrology, and so I pointed out to him constellations such as the Swan and the Great Bear and others that my grandfather had once taught me. One evening, after dinner, as we sat together on the crest of a great dune, Bemossed reached up toward an array of lights named the Angels' Tears, and he said, 'I don't think those stars shine down upon Hesperu.'

'Of course they do,' I told him. 'We haven't come so far to the north that they wouldn't. It is just that these stars are faint, and the air in your land contains too much moisture, and so blocks their radiance.'

He nodded his head at this, then told me, 'It is strange: water is life, and here there is so little of it. And yet everything here is so alive.'

I said nothing as I gazed off at Solaru, Icesse and bright Arras, and other lights that were as old friends to me. And Bemossed continued: 'The sky here is so black — and yet the stars are so bright.'

I said nothing to this either as I found the splendid pair of lights that I had named Shavashar and Elianora.

'I don't think he can see us here,' Bemossed said to me. 'Morjin can't — and that is strange because the air in this emptiness is clearer and the light is more brilliant than I had ever imagined.'

I drew my sword and watched the starlight play upon its silvery surface. I said, 'Once, I was sure that Morjin would find his way to claim this for himself. Now, I think, it is almost free of his foulness. The others say that of their gelstei, too.'

Bemossed smiled at this. 'And you think that is because of me.'

'I know it is. With every passing mile, you seem ever clearer. Ever brighter, too.'

His heavy eyebrows pulled together as he said, 'But we still have so many miles to go.'

'Do you doubt that we can defeat Morjin now?'

He thought about this as the wind whipped wisps of dark sand across the gleaming dunes, and blew steadily out of the northwest, almost as from another world. The words he spoke then would remain with me for many many miles, and all the rest of my life: 'But that is just it, Valashu. I do not wish to defeat Morjin as you do.'

During the days that followed, as we held a straight and steady course across the Tar Harath, I tried better to understand this wise, gentle and yet powerful man who had been born a slave. He seemed always willing to be open with me, even as I sensed that he always kept the worst of his sufferings and his deepest dreams to himself. Something in his essential being seemed flow like quick-silver, difficult to look upon for all its shifting brilliance, and impos-sible to grasp. In the end, I thought, he would remain to me a more profound mystery than life and death.

In the coming days we journeyed on past the ides of Vane into the later part of that month. As we drew farther and farther from the Loikalii's wood, the north wind gradually weakened and then died altogether. It didn't matter, for finally the desert began to cool of its own. Our long ride across it became almost pleasant.

And then we came out of the Tar Harath into the country of the Avari. On the 24th of Valte we found that break in the mountains sheltering the Hadr Halona. As we rode past the many tents and houses of this place of water, the Avari came out into the streets to greet us. Warriors drew their curving swords and saluted us, and they shouted out their surprise that we had returned from out of the Tar Harath. Many of them, I saw to my dismay, seemed to have been recently wounded, as evidenced by arms hanging in slings or bandaged faces. I knew without being told that the Avari had finally been driven to war, even as Sunji had feared.

We met with him later that day in his father's house by the lake when King Jovayl invited guests for a great victory feast. Some of these were elders of the tribe with whom we had sat before: Laisar, Jaidray, Barsayr and old Sarald. Maidro arrived wearing a white bandage wrapped around his head, and we cried out in gladness to greet our former companion. Arthayn accompanied him, but we waited in vain for Nuradayn to appear. And then Sunji informed us that the impulsive Nuradayn had fallen in battle.

'He survived the Tar Harath.' Sunji told us. 'only to die leading a charge against the Zuri's swords.'

'He was a brave man. and we honor him,' King Jovayl announced as he bade us sit down to the many platters of food laid out on his great white carpet, 'When he went into the Tar Harath, he was still much of a youth, and too reckless, its we all knew. But when he came out, he was a man, bold and yet balanced, and worthy of all our respect. And so we gave him a command.'

He went on to say that the deep desert was like a forge, either shaping and tempering the steel inside a man or destroying it.

'The Tar Harath has changed you, Valaysu,' he said, staring at me. 'There is something about you now, something. It is as rare as skystone, and ten times more striking. It cannot be denied.'

He nodded at Liljana, Daj, Master Juwain and paused for a long time as he looked at Maram. 'All of you. You have done a great thing, and this greatness shines for all to see.'

He lifted up a bottle of wine, and he filled each of our glasses with his own hand. Then he bowed his head toward Bemossed.

'It seems that you have found the one you sought,' he told us. 'Well, we shall see.'

Bemossed returned his bow, and said, 'What do you mean, lord?'

'My warriors have returned with me from the battle,' King Jovayl told him, 'and too many of them bear wounds beyond all help. If you are the Maitreya that Valaysu sought, you will heal them.'

He went on to recount what had happened in the desert while we made quest in faraway Hesperu. Sunji had thought that there might be war with the Zuri in the autumn, but King Jovayl had surprised him, and everyone else in the tribe, by moving against the Zuri in the heat of Soal. And more, he had surprised the Zuri. It had been the Masud's wells that Morjin's droghul had poisoned, (with the compliance of the Zuri), but it was King Jovayl who led the crusade of vengeance. He had not only made allies of the Masud and their fierce chief, Rohaj, but of the Yieshi as well. Their three armies, like the points of stabbing spears, he had coordinated in a vicious attack upon the Zuri, from out the west, the north and east. They worked a great slaughter upon the Zuri warriors, and they put to the sword their chief, Tatuk, and all the Red Priests, who had corrupted him. Some of the Zuri women they took as wives, while others they slew — along with many children, too, for even boys ten years old tried to defend their families with lances and swords. King Jovayl had finally managed to put an end to this massacre. Then the Avari warriors, along with the Masud and the Yieshi, had driven the survivors from their homes, and they divided the Zuri's lands among the three tribes.

'The Zuri are no more,' King Jovayl announced proudly. 'We have heard that a few of their clans have begged mercy from the Vuai, but they must be few, and they will never take back what we have claimed.'

I traded looks with Maram, who took a huge gulp of wine. It was a terrible thing that the Avari had done, but that was the way of things with the tribes of the Red Desert. With a single brilliant and ruthless campaign. King Jovayl had put an end to Morjin's hopes of conquering this vast country, at least for a time, and I should have been glad for that.

Bemossed, however, took no joy in King Jovayl's news — nor, in truth, in King Jovayl. All during the least, he picked at his food and kept a silence. Later that night, as we took a walk by the lake, he said to me, 'Did you see the way that King Jovayl and the elders looked at me? As if I existed only to prove their prophecies and justify their crusades. Is that why I am?'

I gazed at the starlight reflected off the lake's black, mirrored surface. I said, 'King Jovayl has only asked for your help in healing his people, and there is nothing wrong with that.'

'Does he care about them?' he said.

'Of course he does — they are his warriors.'

'His warriors,' he repeated. 'Who have murdered in the name of the good.'

I let my hand fall upon my sword's hilt and said, 'So have I, Bemossed.'

'I know — I have seen you. But you did not slay women and children.'

'Is it so much better to slay a man?' I asked him. 'Slaughter is slaughter. That is war, and why I hate it. And why it must end.'

I turned to look at him through the pale light pouring down from the sky, and I told him, 'And that is why you are.'

The next morning, however, when King Jovayl called the wounded to his house from the dwellings across the Hadr Halona and the pastures farther out in the desert, Bemossed was loath to go among them. He remained within his room, and people said that he was not the Maitreya after all — either that, or his power had failed him. And so Master Juwain went out to tend to the stricken warriors in his place. Master Juwain had a great gift of his own for healing, and he managed to draw a lance point buried deep in the back of one of the warriors and to reset the bones of another whose arm had been badly broken. But he could do nothing for a third warrior sweating and gasping at the pain of a leg crushed when a horse had fallen upon it — nothing without his gelstei, that is. In desperation, not wanting to have to cut off the man's leg, Master Juwain finally took out his gelstei. He held it over the shattered leg. But as before with Maram, a hot green fire poured out of the crystal instead of a healing light, and struck into the man a pure agony. Seeing this, Bemmsed's heart broke open. He hurried out of King Jovayl's house, and set his hand upon the man's leg, and he made it whole. Likewise, he restored a warrior named Irgayn with an infected sword wound in his belly, and young Dalvayr who had suffered a dizzying blow to the back of his head, and others. At the end of the day, when this great work of healing was finished, I took him aside and said to him, 'You were kind to men you call murderers.' Then he looked at me with a deep light running tn his eyes like water, and he told me, 'Until war is ended upon this world we are all murderers.'

We stayed one more night in King Jovayl's house, and set out at dawn to continue our desert crossing. King Jovayl commanded Sunji Maidro, Arthayn and six other warriors to escort us to the edge of the Avari's country, and this they did. For a day we rode south along the little range of mountains, and then we turned east and travelled a good few miles farther until we came to lands claimed by the Masud. There, by a great red rock as flat at the top as a sheet of paper, we said farewell to Sunji — I hoped not forever.

'We have no plans to return this way.' I told him, 'but the wind blows where it will blow.'

'Not always,' he said, removing his cowl to smile at Estrella. We had stopped not far from that place in the barren mountains where she had found a new source of water. 'But I hope one day it blows as together again.'

'I know it will,' I told him. 'Until then, go in the light of the One.'

'That will be easier now,' he said, bowing his head to Bemossed. He told him, 'I never thanked you, did I, for healing Daivayr? He is my brother.'

After that we journeyed east through the sere, sun-baked land by which we had first entered the desert. We drank water from the Masud's wells, and we did not fear that they would take this as thievery. After the battle in the canyon, when Yago had cut off the second droghul's head, he had promised us that if we ever ventured into the Masud's realm again, we would be welcome.

So it proved to be. On our fourth day out from the Hadr Halona, a band of Masud warriors returnmg from the destruction of the Zuri espied u. At first threy seemed eager tor another battle, for they charged upon us in cloud of dust. But when we called out our names and that we were friends of Yago and under the protection of Rohaj, they called back that they would extend us all their hospitality. True to their word, they shared with us some dried goat meat, figs and fermented milk. Then, over the next few days, they rode with us all the way to that place where the desert ended against the great wall of the White Mountains.

We said farewell to these warriors, too, and I wondered if we really would see any of the Red Desert's fierce peoples again. It surprised me that I had come to love the desert — its brilliance and stark beauty — as much as I dreaded going up into the mountains.

Part of my disquiet, I knew, came from my memories of the monster that had so nearly killed us on our first crossing of these heights. As we worked up toward the gap where Jezi Yaga had once lived and turned wayfarers into stone, we finally caught sight of the place where she had perished. High on a shelf of rock overlooking the desert, she still stood: a great, hideous stone statue with violet eyes. Maram, with some trepidation, insisted on going up to her and laying his hands upon her face. Perhaps he wanted to reassure himself that she really was dead. He wept then, and he could not tell us why.

We all moved forward past this lonely sentinel, and we began working our way through the gap's rugged terrain. That night it grew quite cold. Master Juwain calculated that we had journeyed into Ashvar, the month of the falling leaves, which in the mountains could turn almost as frigid as winter. No snow, however, fell upon us during our passage of the gap. We rode up and up past red-leaved trees through air that steamed our breath. When we came to that place by the gap's central stream where Jezi had turned Berkuar to stone, we paused to pray for him. He stood like an immortal, still wearing the gold medallion that I had placed around his neck.

'Perhaps you should take that back,' Liljana said to me, pointing at the medallion. 'If anyone chances this way, he will likely claim it.'

'No, let it remain,' I said. 'Berkuar is entitled to keep it.' 'Then perhaps we should bury him, and let it lie with him.' I considered this as I watched Bemossed step up to Berkuar and

touch his hand to Berkuar's stony fingers. I found myself gazing

at Bemossed a little too intently.

And he said to me, 'I cannot bring back the dead, Valashu.' 'I know that,' I told him. I rapped my knuckles against the trunk of a maple as I added, 'And I know it would be best to leave Berkuar just as he is, looking upon these beautiful trees. It is a kind of life, isn't it?'

After that we journeyed on into the more heavily wooded eastern reaches of the gap, and I thought more and more about life — and thus about death. Although we hadn't yet drawn very close to that dark, diseased part of the Acadian forest called the Skadarak, I knew that we could not avoid it. Our reasons for setting a course close to it remained as before. It was reason that told me we could survive it, as we had once, and yet as I contemplated going anywhere near the Skadarak's blackened and twisted trees, my disquiet built into a howling, belly-shaking dread.

So it was with my friends. In our descent of the mountains down into Acadu's cold, gray woods, Daj fell as quiet as Estrella, while Atara, Liljana and Master Juwain rode along lost in a terrible silence. And then, with our horses' hooves crunching over dead leaves, Maram finally looked at Master Juwain and said, 'At the Avari's hadrah, when you tried to use your crystal, you only proved that Morjin still has a hold on it. It must be, then, that he still has a hold on the Black Jade, and so on us.'

Master Juwain could usually summon a well-thought response to almost any statement. This time, however, he only looked at Maram as he shrugged his shoulders, then drew the hood of his cloak over his bald head.

And so I told Maram, 'He has no hold over us — at least, not our hearts.'

'But what of our gelstei?' He drew out his firestone and stared at it. 'I'm afraid of what I feel building inside this. I am, Val.'

'It will be all right,' I told him.

'It will not be all right, just because you say so.' He turned in his saddle to look back at Bemossed, riding next to the children. 'He was supposed to take control of the Lightstone from Morjin.'

'Give it time,' I told him.

'Time,' he muttered. 'In another day, I think, we'll come to the Skadarak. Who knows, we might have entered it already.'

His deepest fears, however, and my own, proved groundless. After some more miles of. riding through gray-barked trees shedding their leaves, we came to that strip of forest bordering the marshland to the south and the Skadarak to the north. I led the way straight into it. We rode on and on into a smothering still-ness, and soon the sky grew thick with black clouds, and we all heard the call of a voice we dreaded above all others. But then Bemossed nudged his horse up close beside me. He smiled at ml and the sun rose in that dark, dark place. Alphanderry came out of nowhere to sing us a bright, immortal song. And although the terrible voice continued murmuring its maddening tones, as it always would, we did not listen. And so we completed our passage of the Skadarak once again.

The workings of fate are strange. We had traveled all the way from Hesperu nearly a thousand miles across some of Ea's harshest and deadliest country without incident, almost as if we had gone on a holiday. Now, with only one last stretch of forest to negotiate before reaching our journey's end, Maram rejoiced that our luck had held good. But he rejoiced too soon.

The woods of Acadu, as we discovered, proved to be infested with even more Crucifiers than before, for Morjin had sent a battalion of soldiers down from Sakai to quell the unrest and exterminate the forces opposing him. We did what we could to avoid them. The trees, however, more and more barren with every mile that we pressed eastward toward winter, provided us little cover. We had trouble crossing Acadu's rivers: the great Ea and the Tir. We hoped to fall in with the Greens and gain a little protection for at least a part of our passage, but we learned that these Keepers of the Forest had concentrated their forces for a great battle up north of the minelands, where Acadu bordered Sakai. I set a course almost due east, over wet leaves and between trees that seemed as dead and gray as ghosts. Thus we made our way through the rainy and dark days of late Ashvar by ourselves.

We came close to the Nagarshath range of the White Mountains safely. And then, within a span of fifty miles, we fought two battles. In the first of these, a squadron of soldiers came upon us at the edge of a farmer's field, and they demanded that we surrender up Atara and Estrella to 'cook and provide comfort for them,' as they put it. We killed these ten Crucifiers quickly, down to the last man. Two days later, with the jagged, white-capped peaks of the mountains gleaming through the leafless trees, a band of Acadians who had gone over to Morjin tried to relieve us of our possessions — as well as our lives. We fought an arrow duel with them: Kane put a feathered shaft through their leader's eye, while Maram killed two men with arrows buried exactly in the centers of their chests. Seeing this, their companions lost heart and melted away into the forest. We all made ready to rejoice then, but we discovered that Daj had taken an arrow straight through his thigh. Remarkably, he bore this nasty wound without crying out or making any sound. He kept his silence, too, as Master Juwain drew the arrow with great difficulty, for its barbs had caught up in Daj's tendons Bemossed managed to heal his torn and bleeding leg with little difficulty, and within an hour, Daj could walk with little pain. I, however, suffered a stab of guilt that would not go away, for this was the first time in our travels that one of the children had been seriously wounded.

At last we came to the place where the forest's trees rose up the steep slopes of the mountains. We found the ravine by which we had come down into Acadu months before, and now we made our way up into it. The ascent was hard, for Ashvar's rains had fallen here as snow, which grew deeper and deeper the higher we climbed. It grew much colder, too. I kept watching the sky for sign that the clouds might thicken up and loose upon us a major storm. 'If it does snow too much or too long,' Maram said, giving voice to my thoughts, 'we could be trapped here all winter. How much food do we have left? Ten days' worth? Twenty, if we stretch it?' 'Be quiet!' Kane told him, looking about the trees of the snow-covered ravine. 'If we have to, we can always kill a few deer.'

'If any remain this high up,' Maram said, shivering. He watched his horse's breath steaming out of its nostrils.

'So, if we really have to,' Kane told Maram with a wicked light in his eyes, 'we could always kill you. I'd bet that you'd keep us in meat longer than three fat bucks, eh?'

To emphasize his point, he moved over and poked his finger into Maram's belly, still quite rotund, though considerably diminished due to the hardships of our journey. And Maram said to him, 'That is not funny! You shouldn't joke about such things!'

Something in Kane's voice, however, caused Maram to look at him to make sure he really was joking. With Kane, one never quite knew.

'I'm afraid that snow or no snow," Master Juwain said, 'we must go on. Tomorrow is the twenty-eighth of Ashvar.'

'Are you sure we're not late?' Maram asked as he pulled his cloak tighter around his throat and stamped his boots in the snow. 'It feels more like Segadar — and late Segadar at that.'

'I've kept a count of the days,' Master Juwain reassured him. 'But are you certain about the twenty-eighth? I haven't had a clear sight of the stars for half a month.'

'I am not the greatest astrologer, it's true,' Master Juwain admitted. 'But if my calculations are correct, then tomorrow the moon will conjunct the Seven Sisters.'

Again, I gazed skyward at the overlying sheet of gray above us. Who could tell where the moon would cross that night? Who could even see the sun, much less the stars?

We continued climbing up into the mountains, all the rest of that day and most of the next. One of the pack horses stumbled in the deep snow, and broke its neck on some rocks. It died before Bemossed could even attempt to help it. Later, the foot of Daj's wounded leg began to freeze, and we had to stop more than once to thaw his toes. Finally, though, we came up to a wall of rock where one of the tunnels through these mountains opened like a yawning, black mouth. With great satisfaction, Master Juwain announced that we still had hours to spare.

'The conjunction should occur late tonight,' he informed us, 'just two hours before dawn.'

'Ah, it should occur,' Maram agreed, 'but what if it doesn't? I wish Master Storr had given us one his gelstei so that we could unlock this damn tunnel any time we pleased.'

But Master Storr, I thought, for all his hope that our quest would end successfully, had not been willing to entrust the key to the Brotherhood's secret school to wayfarers who might be captured and might surrender up his precious gelstei to Morjin.

'If you're wrong about the date,' Maram said to Master Juwain, 'when is the next nearest motion of the stars that will open this?' 'Not until the second of Triolet. I don't think you would want to wait that long.'

'I don't want to wait another hour, much less twelve,' Maram said. 'But I suppose there's no help for it?'

If Bemossed had doubted that the pool in the Loikalii's vild might provide a passage to the stars, he could not deny the magic of the tunnel. Two hours before dawn, with the sky beginning to clear, we entered this dark tube of rock. It came alive in pulses of iridescent light. As before, its workings made us sick in our stomachs and disoriented us; and as before, our focused will took us through it, out into that beautiful, sunny valley that sheltered the Brotherhood's greatest school.

This time, no trick of Master Virang or our own blindness kept the sight of it from us. We rejoiced at the cluster of gleaming stone buildings by the valley's frozen river. It took us until mid-morning to ride down through the drifts of snow and reach this haven. Abrasax and the six other masters, with all two hundred of the men who lived and studied here, came out of their dwellings and gathered in front of the great hall to greet us. When Bemossed fairly dropped off his horse, stiff and nearly frozen, Abrasax gazed at him for a long time. I sensed that he was seeing in him colors other than those of the outer world; the green of the fir trees; the sweeps of white snow; the blue sky's brilliant golden sun.

'Valashu Elahad,' Master Storr said, standing next to Abrasax, 'brings another stranger into our valley.'

Estrella came up to Bemossed, and took his hand. She waved her other hand about in the frigid air as if she desperately desired the gift of being able to talk to us again. But as Abrasax had said months before, her words held less power than did her eyes or her heart. She looked at Bemossed in adoration, with a perfect brilliance felt by all who stood gazing upon them. For a long moment, it was Estrella who seemed to speak, in sparkling streams and shimmering oceans deeper than any words, while Master Storr stood there struck dumb like a mute — and so it was with the other Masters of the Seven, and all the Brothers, as well as my friends and even myself.

'He is no stranger,' Abrasax said as he bowed his head to Bemossed. Then held up his long, wrinkled hand, and shouted out: 'It is he whom we've known from all our books and dreams! The quest has been completed! Valashu Elahad and his companions have found the Shining One!'

Then he cast aside all decorum and restraint, and he rushed forward to embrace Bemossed, as he did with each of us in our turn. His old face warmed with the brightest of smiles.

Even the dour old Master Storr couldn't help smiling along with him, and he called out, 'Then they have brought us the greatest, gift in the world — and just in time for your birthday, Grandfather!'

All the rest of the Seven and the two hundred Brothers standing about in the snow let out a great cheer. Abrasax's attention finally turned from the miracle of Bemossed's existence to the sorry state of our clothing, mounts and our care-worn flesh. Then he commanded us to repair to the guest houses and recover from our great journey.