Black Jade

by David Zindell

  I could scarcely believe that a man could eat so much, but then reminded myself that Kane was scarcely a man. After he had filled his belly, he lay back to digest this feast. Then he stirred a few hours later to begin eating again. So it went through the course of that long, hot day. By the afternoon, he was able to stand on the stony earth beneath a blazing, white-hot sun; in the early evening, he began pacing about our encampment as he cast his bright eyes toward the south, east, north and west. He drew his long sword and began his nightly practice, stabbing straight out into the hearts of imagined enemies, slashing and slicing the gleaming steel with a renewed ferocity that tore apart the air. And still the deep, red fire of life blazed hotter and brighter inside him. When full night fell upon the earth and the lions roared out in the distance, Kane turned his savage face toward the wind and roared back at them. He thrust the point of his sword straight up toward the stars, and raised back his head in a long, triumphant howl to the heavens that it was good to be alive.

  After that, he rejoined us for some tea. As his hand closed around his cup, his powerful body rippled with a restlessness that drove him to pace about, circling the fire again and again as the earth does the sun.

  'So,' he growled out, 'I must thank all of you for tending to me. I can tell you little of what happened - the truth that can be told is not the deepest truth, eh? And I had fallen so deep. So, the Black Jade in the Skadarak nearly sucked out our souls. My black gelstei nearly sucked out my life. Morjin made it so. It nearly turned me into ice. He came for me then. He sucked out my blood, and when that wasn't enough, the very liquids of my throat and eyes. There was a blackness - only a cold blackness, and nothing more.'

  He drew out his black gelstei and stared at it a moment before shaking his head and putting it away again.

  'How is it then,' Master Juwain asked him, 'that you are still alive?'

  'Ha! - the next time I use my stone, I might not be, eh?' Kane's lips pulled back in a terrible smile. 'From what you've said, it seems that Maram forced Morjin to turn his attention away from my little bauble. Then too . . .'

  His voice died into a deep rumble as he looked at me. 'Then, too,' he went on, 'there is always the fire, eh? The light. It is hard to put it out. Especially with the lights of my friends shining through me like seven suns.'

  He turned his bright smile from me as he met eyes with each of us. He looked at Estrella for a long time. And then he said, 'Enough of that. We've other things to speak of. Liljana - how much food do we have left? How much water?'

  With much relief, we turned our talk from Morjin and his dark ening of our gelstei to the more practical concerns of our quest. Our plan to cross the desert posed considerable problems of logistics. Our horses and remounts would be able to find only so much forage in such a sere land, and if they were to bear us on their backs, the pack horses must bear on their backs much grain to feed them. But they could not carry all the water that we. and our mounts, would need to reach the streams and rivers of the Crescent Mountains. Therefore everything depended upon us finding the water holes that had quenched Kane's thirst so long ago.

  'There should be a well fifty miles from here,' Kane said, pointing out into the dark land to the west. 'We'll find a low line of red hills, two miles in length, and the well just to the north of them.'

  'But will we be able to draw water from it?' Master Juwain asked.

  'If it hasn't gone dry,' Kane said. 'And if its owners allow it.'

  Once, he said, the clans of the Taiji tribe had held sway throughout the southeastern lands of the Red Desert. Kane had bought water, and other necessities of life, from them. But all the Ravirii tribes hated outsiders, even pilgrims, and sometimes refused to trade water for gold. If times were hard and the hot winds of war maddened them, they would even put wayfarers to the sword, taking their lives and their gold.

  At the look of concern on Maram's face as he told us this, Kane clapped him on the arm and said, 'Don't worry - the Ravirii are great warriors, it's true, but therefore they respect nothing so much as even greater warriors. And who are greater than the Valari, eh? If it comes to swords, once they see our kalamas at work, they'll leave us well alone.'

  Two hours before dawn, in the coolest part of the night, we set out to the west. It soon became clear that Maram was to have a horrible time of it, for he could hardly ride. Because it tormented him to sit in his hard leather saddle, he took to standing in his horse's stirrups. But the constant, rocking abrasion against his torn thighs proved almost as bad. When he could bear the pain no longer, he dismounted and walked beside his horse. Among the few parts of his body that Jezi Yaga hadn't bitten, as he told us. were the soles of his feet.

  After a while, the sun came up over the mountains in the east and touched the desert with a golden-red glow. This wasteland, as I saw, turned out to be full of life - but spread out sparsely across huge distances. That morning I saw snakes slithering through the knife grass, and horny toads, and sandrunners hopping along as they looked for insects to scoop up in their yellow bills. Other birds winged through the air: rock sparrows and gambels and hawks. We came across a lone, black-maned lion feeding on the carcass of an antelope. Fifty yards away, a pack of hyenas waited for the lion to finish his feast, as vultures circled high overhead.

  As it grew hot, we all donned the hats that Liljana had made for us: rather ridiculous-looking constructions that might have been cowls hacked off of robes. They would help protect our heads and necks from the ceaseless sun. I sweated streams of salt water beneath my hat, cloak and my armor. Soon it became clear that I could not go on this way. I could cast aside my cloak, but that would leave my armor exposed to the sun's fierce rays. The rings of steel mail would quickly heat up like the metal of a skillet and roast me inside. Kane had warned me that I would not be able to wear my armor across the desert, but I had not wanted to believe him.

  'You must divest yourself of it,' he told me, riding up beside me. 'As I must, too.'

  'Must I?' I said, touching my finger to my burning, jangling mail. How many times, I wondered, in how many battles had it saved me from being pierced by arrow, spear or sword? 'I'd feel naked without it. A little farther - let's see if we can bear it.'

  We rode on deeper into a burning plain dotted with clumps of ursage and thornbush. The wavering air heated up even more. So did I - so did we all. The horses sweated profusely; never had I seen so much water pour from Altaru's sleek black hide. Flies descended on us in buzzing, black clouds. Sweat now ran inside my armor in rivers; it seemed as if I were swimming in a hot, salty bath. Sweat worked its way down my forehead and stung my eyes. The others suffered as badly, or worse. I could almost feel the sweat soaking through Maram's many bandages and working salt into the red rawness of his wounds.

  'Ah, oh!' I overheard him grumble to himself. 'Maram, my old friend, you're supposed to marvel at the One and all the One's works, but tell me truly: if you had made the world, would you have filled it with such horrible heat and these bloody damn flies that take pieces out of a man? No, no, it's too much, a child could see that - too, too damn much.'

  When the sun grew too fierce, in the terrible heat of the afternoon, we broke to take shelter beneath our sun cloths and rest. I finally removed my armor and the sodden leather underpadding, and stowed this heavy mass of accoutrements with one of the packhorses. I donned a long tunic that coveted me from neck to ankle. I forced myself to go water the horses before partaking of any of vital liquid myself. It was astonishing how much a thirsty horse could drink. In nearly all our journeys, there had always been some river or stream for our mounts to try to empty. Now, as we held leather buckets to their frothy lips, they did empty them, with such alarming rapidity that we had to pull the buckets away and ration them. We were only slightly kinder to ourselves.

  When Daj handed me one of our waterskins, I drank enough to ease some of the parch of my throat, but not enough to really replenish me. With every fiber in my body crying out for moisture, it seemed that there wasn
't enough water in all the world to fill me.

  Kane, turning east to orient himself on the white mountains of the Yorgos range, said to us, 'We've made good distance today, and so we should reach the first well tomorrow. There we can drink as much as we'd like.'

  'If the well isn't dry,' Maram said, licking his puffy, much-bitten lips. He kicked at a clump of brown ursage and said, 'Everything about this land is dry and growing drier by the mile.'

  'Ha - you think this is bad?' Kane called out to him. He stood squinting up at the sun as if challenging this bright white orb to take the water from him. 'In the deep desert, there is no water. Nothing grows, and so nothing lives. The winds drive the sand into mountains. The Tar Harath, they call that place.'

  He looked toward the northwest, and a strange burning filled his eyes.

  'If there is no water there,' Maram asked him, 'then how will we cross it?'

  'We won't,' Kane said, pointing almost due west. 'Our course lies well to the south of the Tar Harath. There'll be water enough, if we don't waste what we have and keep ourselves strong enough to reach it.'

  Stregth, however, Maram now lacked, for Jezi Yaga had bled much of it out of him. In the late afternoon, with the heat abating slightly, he dozed if his saddle and several times nearly fell off. Dusk found us still plodding along, for we had to take advantage of the first evening hours to gain as many miles as we could, in the cool twilight Maram fought to keep his eyes open and his_ hands fastened around the reins of his horse. At last I took pity on him and gave him the bag of barbark nuts that I had removed from the pocket of the cloak draped around Berkuar's petrified body. I hated to see Ma ram put tongue to any intoxicant, but if the barbark juice would help him to remain awake and ease his I pain, so much the better.

  We finally encamped on a little swell of ground affording a fine view in all directions. Maram struck up a tittle fire, and Liljana brought out her gleaming cookware, made of galte that the Ymanir had forged for her out of the ores of the White Mountains. None of us had much stomach for the hotcakes and roasted gazelle that she prepared for dinner. But she, like Kane, insisted that we must keep up our strength. I tried to eat with a grateful smile, but found myself longing for pears, plums and other succulent foods instead.

  Kane, having 'slept' more than long enough beneath the evil enchantment of his black gelstei. flood watch through most of the night.

  Maram thought it strange that we had seen no sign of man since setting foot in the desert. But as Kane told him: 'I once wandered here for forty days, and my only companions were the lizards and snakes.'

  'Wandered?' Maram moaned. 'I don't like the sound of that!'

  'Don't worry,' Kane said. 'Our course is set and is nearly straight. Now get yourself a little sleep, and heal those ugly wounds of yours.'

  Our journey the next morning was much the same as that of the previous day, save that it seemed even hotter. Maram sweated the scabs off his wounds, and Master Juwain had to cast away his bloody bandages and make new dressings. I grew very alarmed at the rapid and inexorable disappearance of our water. As I calculated things, we would arrive at the first well with our waterskins less than half full. If the well proved dry, our situation would fall grim.

  'If the well proves full,' Maram said to Kane, 'it's likely to be in use, isn't it? By the Taiji. as you call these people? They'll see us coming from miles away. I only hope they greet us with alias instead of arrows,'

  Maram, I knew, felt even more vulnerable than I at losing his armor.

  Kane waved off his concern, saying. 'The Ravirii tribes know nothing of arrow, as they haven't any wood to make them. Their weapons are the lance and sword, And they don't wear armor, either.'

  His words encouraged Maram, a little, and for a while it seemed he sat up straighter on his horse. When Kane finally descried the hills that he had told of rising red along the horizon, Maram let his hand rest upon the hilt of his sword. He licked his lips and swallowed against the dust, then said, 'If there is water there, I'd fight a very dragon to claim it.'

  Late that afternoon we drew closer to the last, low hump of a hill. I looked hard to make out anything that seemed like a well, but the perpetual shimmer of the desert distances stymied me. The horses' hooves kicked up a cloud of dust that billowed into the air like a great, waving banner. We all waited for Taijii warriors to ride out to greet us - with either salutations or swords.

  But no one did. Maram, who could blow as fickle as the wind, chose to take this as a bad sign, saying that surely this proved the well must be dry. We rode closer to the place toward which Kane had pointed us. At last I saw the well: a circular wall of stones built as if erupting from the very ground. All around it was nothing except ursage and bitterbroom, spike grass and thornbush and the red rocks of the desert.

  I fought the urge to press my heels into Altaru's sides and gallop straight up to the well. We continued our slow ride in good formation. I saw signs of old encampments everywhere: the blackened rocks of firepits and rubbish heaps full of bits of broken horn, charred wool and cracked, sun-bleached bones. When we had drawn within a dozen yards of the well, I noticed Altaru's nostrils quivering as if he had caught scent of water; he nickered happily and dug his hoof into the earth. I knew then that the well was full. Maram, though, couldn't quite believe our good fortune, and so I told him to go see for himself.

  He fairly flew off his horse and ran up to the well. After bracing his hands on its rim, he stuck his head down into it and called out a great, echoing shout of relief. Then he jumped back, grabbed up the leather bucket attached to a long rope tied around the well, and heaved the bucket down in. There came a muffled splash.

  Maram cried out again. .

  'Oh, joy!' he called out. 'Oh, mercy and sweet succor! There is hope for us yet!'

  In the hours after that, we pulled up many bucketfuls of sweet, cool water. We all drank to our deepest content. We let the horses quench themselves, too. We washed the dust from our faces and sticky old sweat from our bodies. All our waterskins we filled. Liljana was keen to set out her pots so that she might wash our soiled and stinking clothing, but we finally decided against this. It wouldn't do to waste the well's water, even if it did seem inexhaustible.

  We slept contentedly that night if not very long. Again, we roused ourselves well before dawn and made our preparations for the next leg of our journey. After leaving some coins by the well to pay for the water that we had taken, we set out into the cool desert. The stars, twinkling brightly, pointed out way. We all dreaded the rising of the sun. That day was very much like the ones that had preceded it: dear, hot, dusty and dry. As Maram had said, with every mile that we rode toward the west, the desert grew even drier. Here the hardy grasses yielded to ursage and thornbush, and the herds of antelope and gazelle vanished, to be replaced by a few scrawny ostrakats and wild asses who ran away at our approach. The flies, however, still filled the air in abundance. They buzzed most fiercely around Maram and swarmed around his bandages, drawn by the smell of blood.

  For two days we rode straight across the cracked red earth toward the second well. We sucked down the water from our leather containers, and the burning air sucked the water from us. I looked to the sky for any sign of rain, but the immense blue dome above us showed only a few wispy white clouds, drifting toward the north. Kane told us that in the Red Desert, it never rained in the month of Soldru, nor in Marud or Soal.

  We found the second well with mounds of sand blown against its stone walls. As we all feared, it proved dry.

  'It's been many years since I came this way,' Kane said, 'so it shouldn't be a surprise that one of these wells has failed us.'

  'No,' Maram said, rubbing at one of his bloody bandages, 'I'm not surprised either. Why should anyone be surprised by his fate?'

  'Take heart,' I said to him. 'The next well will be full.'

  'Full of sand, most likely,' Maram muttered. 'And what then?'

  'It won't be full of sand,' I said to him. 'Believing it will be w
ill only make our journey harder and thirstier.'

  Maram sighed as he wiped the sweat from his eyes and stared out into the hot, ruddled plain to the west. He said to Kane, 'How far then, to the next well?'

  'Eighty miles,' Kane said, looking that way, too. 'Perhaps ninety.'

  'Ninety miles!' Maram groaned. 'Will our water take us that far?'

  Liljana licked her dusty lips and said, 'If were careful. And careful we'll be as long as I'm in charge of the water.'

  With a heaviness pulling at us, we resumed our journey. We rode long into the night before we encamped by a great outcrop-ping of stark, red rocks. Our dinner that night was meager- battle bread and dried apples and a few handfuls of old nuts. Liljana told us that the body requires much water to digest its food. The Ravirii it is said, eat nf meat when they are unsure of their water, and when it falls very low, they do not eat at all.

  For the next three days, we pushed on into the deeps of the desert. The Soldru sun grew ever brighter as tip angle of its searing rays steepened toward the height of summer. The air grew hotter and even drier. We did not make good distance, for the children had a hard time of things, and Maram weakened by the mile. Master Juwain kept changing Maram's bandages, and came to fear that he would soon run out of cloth to bind his wounds. He confided to me that they were not healing as they should. Maram needed rest, shelter and fresh food, all of which, in this terrible journey that seemed to go on and on forever, were denied him.

  'I'm concerned about Maram,' Master Juwain said to me one night beneath a white, crescent moon. 'And not just about his wounds.'

  'Don't worry, sir,' I told him. 'He's much tougher, than even he knows. In the end, he'll come thrown.'

  For part of those three days, we plodded across a wide, gravel-covered pan. The stony ground bruised the horses' hooves and jarred our spines. Nothing grew there, not even ursage or bitter-broom. We saw only a few beetles scurrying along; even the lizards seemed to have fled this terrible terrain. No sign of the Taijii or any other Ravirii tribe could we find anywhere in the empty miles around us.