Black Jade

by David Zindell

  'We're only poor players,' she told Mangus, 'but we could give you one of our horses for him.'

  As she spoke, the sounds of Bemossed tidying up beyond the open door to the healing chamber suddenly quieted. And Mangus said, 'But what would I want with a horse? And why would you want to buy a Hajarim?'

  He knew well enough the answer to his question. As Liljana started to say something about all the dirty tasks involved with a traveling troupe's constantly making and breaking camp, Mangus held up his hand to interrupt her.

  'Mother Magda,' he intoned as his face fell stern, 'I know there is talk about Bemossed in the village. But it is only idle talk. The villagers are only simple folk, and know nothing of the art of healing.'

  'Are you saying that Bemossed is of no help to you?'

  Mangus ran a finger along one of his coils of white hair. He pulled at the cuff of his tunic. I sensed his great interest in dealing with Liljana. But it must have occurred to him that if he insisted that Bemossed was of little value, he could ask only a small price for him.

  'Bemossed,' he said, 'is a great help to me. No one has ever kept our house so clean My wife and I are very fond of him.'

  'But is he of no help in healing?'

  Mangus looked at Maram and Kane, and then back at Liljana. 'I did not say that. He helps in ways that you wouldn't understand.'

  'Is he a healer, then?'

  'Bemossed?'

  Liljana sidled over to Maram and grasped his arm. She said, 'Garath felt sure that Bemossed laid his hand upon him. The people of the village have told of such laying on of hands as well.'

  Mangus now ran his finger along the collar of his crimson tunic as if the atrium had suddenly grown too hot. He said, 'You should know that this is an unusual situation and that we have the sanction of the Kallimun. Before my slave touches anyone, he is purified.'

  'Then he is a healer?'

  'No, certainly not. He does help me, but only as a bandage draws out pus.'

  'You were right,' Liljana said, 'I don't understand.'

  Mangus drew himself up straight and with all his dignity told her, 'Festering sores such as Garath's are caused by demons attacking the body. Bemossed is one of the few born able to draw out these demons.'

  'Into his own body?' Liljana asked.

  Just then Bemossed came out of the chamber bearing a soiled basin. He did not look at me as he crossed the atrium then exited by way of the back door.

  'He is Hajarim,' Mangus said, as if that explained everything. 'And so you must understand, as these demon-drawers are quite rare, that my slave is very precious to me.'

  Indeed, he was. Although Liljana stood there haggling with Mangus for most of the next hour, she was able to whittle down the unbelievable price that Mangus asked for Bemossed only to a slightly less staggering sum:

  Forty ounces, of gold!

  I cried out this number in the silence of my mind. Who had so much money? I thought that selling Bemossed might very well put an end to Mangus's life as a healer - which might be exactly what he wanted. Perhaps he intended to retire to a small estate by the sea or to flee Hesperu altogether.

  Forty ounces of gold!

  Liljana finally threw up her hands in disgust. She looked at me as apologizing for failing to move Mangus.

  Then I reached into my pocket and drew forth a little bit of metal and stone that was more than precious to me. It was the ring of a Valari lord: heavy silver set with four large, brilliant diamonds. On the field of the Raaswash, in sight of the opposing armies of Ishka and Mesh, my father had put it on my finger to honor me for completing the quest to find the Lightstone. Since his death, however, I had not dared to wear it.

  'This,' I said, showing Mangus the ring, 'is surely worth forty gold pieces.'

  His eyes narrowed as he examined it. 'Even if the stones are real, what would I do with a diamond ring?'

  Because my throat hurt and I could not speak just then, it was Liljana who answered for me: 'You could sell it, if you wished.'

  'You can sell it if you wish,' he told her. 'I haven't the time, but in Kharun, which is only thirty miles up the road, there are jewelers and gem sellers. Why don't you return here when you have the sum that we've agreed upon?'

  Although he smiled at us in a kindly way, his face returned to its usual stern lines, and he indicated that he would argue with us no further. We had no choice then but to return to our camp, and this we did.

  'Forty ounces of gold!' I shouted as I stood by the fire that Daj tended. I held the ring in the flat of my hand as I stared at it. 'How can I trade this for gold? Am I a diamond seller?'

  Diamond sellers were destitute warriors or knights who sold their rings against the law of all the Valari kingdoms, and so brought upon themselves and their families everlasting shame. The worst of thieves were those who waylaid traveling knights for the treasure that they wore or despoiled fallen warriors of their glittering armor, and these were counted as diamond sellers, too.

  Kane came over to me and snatched the ring from my hand. His eyes flared with impatience but with compassion, too. He said to me. 'If you can't sell it, then I shall, eh? All right?'

  I could not look at him as I nodded my head.

  Atara, who sat by the fire as she repaired one of her arrows, said. 'The ring of a Valari lord might be recognized as such even in this land. I would hate for one of the jewelers here to give us away.'

  'So,' Kane said, making a fist around the ring. 'Then I'll chisel the damn diamonds out of it.'

  True to his word, he went off to break my ring apart. I could not bear the sound of his hammer beating against iron, and iron cutting open silver. After Kane had finished this evil work, he came over and said, 'Will you ride with me to Khaurn?'

  'No,' I told him, 'you go with Liljana. It will be better if I remain here.'

  I watched as Kane and Liljana saddled their horses. It seemed utterly mad to me that they were setting out with the diamonds of my ring to get gold to buy a slave.

  They rode away after that. And so, at the edge of the peaceful village of Jhamrul, in a fallow field where voles burrowed and larks sang, we waited all that day and most of the next for them to return. We all gave thanks when we saw their horses cantering back up the lane. With the afternoon sun dropping toward the hills in the west, they dismounted and Liljana showed me a leather purse full of forty jangling gold coins.

  'I've never haggled so hard,' she told me, 'I wanted sixty pieces, but with the sack of Avrian, diamonds are flooding the markets just now. I was lucky to get forty.'

  'All right,' I said, 'then let us go back to Mangus and hope that he hasn't changed his mind.'

  'If he has,' Kane growled out, gripping a knife beneath his cloak, 'we'll change it back for him.'

  Mangus, however, proved true to his word. After we met once again in his atrium and gave him the gold, he counted out the coins, then said, 'I can't tell you how hard it is for me to sell my slave. But it is for the best.'

  I thought that he might be speaking truly. I sensed in him a surprising fondness for Bemossed, and more, his fear for him, as if he dreaded that the Red Priests might return and take Bemossed away to a much worse fate than he would find with us.

  He called Bemossed to him then. Bemossed came into the atrium bearing a tied-up cloth that contained his few possessions: a spare tunic, an owl's feather, an old tooth and the like - or so Mangus told us. Mangus prepared a paper attesting to Bemossed's sale. He invited his wife and the other slaves of his household to bid farewell to him. They all seemed sad to see him go, though I noted that none of them clasped his hand or embraced him.

  'Perhaps your wanderings will bring you back here someday,' Mangus said to Bemossed. 'But wherever you go, may the grace of the Dragon go with you.'

  As we made our way to the front door, the cold, dead eyes chiselled into the bust of Morjin seemed to watch our every movement. Bemossed walked like a condemned man, with his gaze cast down upon the ground. So it was that we made the Maitreya our
slave.

  Chapter 36

  It was too late in the day to break camp and resume our travel, and so we returned to our cart and settled in to enjoying the delicious dinner that Liljana prepared. She cooked us ham and maize-bread, green beans in butter and cucumbers sliced up in sour cream and mint. For dessert we had a rice pudding sweetened with honey, cloves and cinnamon. She determined to welcome Bemossed into our company with foods that might nourish his body, and a camaraderie of like souls. She amazed him by giving a piece of bread directly into his hand. He looked upon her, I sensed, as the mother whom he could hardly remember. It must have been hard for him to reconcile his obvious warm feelings toward her - and toward Maram, Atara, Estrella and Daj -with his bitterness at me for buying him and bearing him away against his will.

  That evening, I borrowed Master Juwain's gelding and gave Bemossed his first riding lesson. As soon as we could, we would set out to recross the north of Hesperu, abandoning the cart when we reached the mountains. Bemossed would need to learn his way with horses. This, I saw, might prove no easy task. Although he had no trouble gentling the gelding with long strokes of his hand, he nearly refused to mount the beast. As he put it 'How is it that men think that they can make slaves of a noble creature and compel him to bear a great weight upon his back?'

  These were the greatest number of words that he had spoken to me since the morning in the meadow. After I compelled him to place his feet in the horse's stirrups, he spoke to me only a little and only at need, responding to my questions or commands with quick, quiet utterances. He never failed to be polite. A score of years as a slave had taught him the ways of respect, and it seemed to me that he used this acquiescent manner not so much to placate me as to pierce me with a spear of guilt over what I had done to him. That he already knew me so well chagrined me, even as it made me believe that he truly was the one whom we had sought for so long.

  He did not, however, carry this revenge to my companions. Neither did he befriend them, at least not at first. In the morning, when we drove our cart out of Jhamrul back toward the Ghurlan Road, he sat beside Estrella on the seat with me in near silence. He seemed to listen to the thump of the horses' hooves and the grinding of the cart's wheels - and to Maram's booming voice as he held forth with Master Juwain and the others, riding ahead of us. Once, Liljana dropped back to ask Bemossed the name of some strange vegetables growing in a field off to the side of the road, and he chatted with her pleasantly enough. And, later that afternoon, Maram got him to laugh with a recitation of 'A Second Chakra Man'. Bemossed seemed to bear a great fondness for Maram, and asked him more than once if his wound might be getting better. I felt him, though, restraining his deeper affections, for Maram and the rest of us, as a man might clamp down his hand upon a cut vein. Beginning with his parents, I thought, he had lost too much in his life to want to risk losing more.

  We made a good few miles that day beneath a clear, hot sky, covering nearly half the distance back toward Orun. Our plan was to recross the Iona River, and then to lose ourselves on forest roads and country lanes, cutting the Senta Road well to the north of Nubur, where we could hardly explain to Goro and Vasul how we had suspiciously transformed ourselves from pilgrims into a troupe of players. We said nothing of this plan to Bemossed. Given time, I was sure that we could win him to our purpose. But for now, as Liljana advised, he must get used to us, and we to him.

  If he remained a mystery to us, then he must have found many things about us to be more than strange. He surely wondered why Kane insisted on surrounding our camp with a fence of old logs and brush, and more, that he remained awake all night, prowling about like a great cat listening to every sound in the woods around us. Master Juwain, in various conversations, betrayed his great erudition about a great number of things, including the healing arts. I could almost hear Bemossed asking himself how a reader of tarot cards and horoscopes had come by such knowledge. I think he puzzled as well over the obvious fact that Daj had been born of Hesperu. When Maram brought up the matter of the Avrian crucifixions, Daj turned toward the north and said, 'They always promised that if there was another rebellion, they would nail everyone up on crosses instead of selling them as slaves.'

  Atara, I sensed, seemed a marvel to him - and possibly much more. After dinner that evening she asked him for help in changing her blindfold. He brought a pot of warm water to her, and cloth for bathing as well. In the light of an almost full moon, he watched as she sat on an old log and washed her face. The hideousness of her scarred eye hollows did not repel him; rather it aroused in him a blazing compassion. He could scarcely control the quavering of his voice as he said to her: 'Is it true that in being blinded you gained the second sight?'

  'I gained something,' she said to him. 'At times, my sight is clearer, now.'

  'But what do you see? I heard you telling fortunes in the square. You promised the widow, Luyu, that she would find happiness and love.'

  'I said that she could find these things. There is always a way. Always a path.'

  'Truly? And can you see this path when you look at someone?'

  'Sometimes.'

  'As you can see other paths, through meadows or woods? I've never heard of a blind woman who can see everything.'

  'Not everything, Bemossed. I can't see you.'

  This, I thought, should have given me great hope, for Atara had told us that the Maitreya always remained veiled in shadow to her, and so she could not describe the lineaments of his face. 'Here,' she said to him, 'come closer.'

  She bade him to kneel down on the ground in front of the log, and he reluctantly did as she asked. Then she reached out toward him, fumbling through naked air until she found his face. She traced her fingers across his forehead and along the line of his curly black hair. She pressed lightly upon his dosed eyelids, then touched his fine nose and flaring cheekbones. She let her palm rest upon his bearded jaw. She smiled, then told him, 'I think you must be as beautiful as Luyu said you were.'

  Atara's words seemed to stun him. He gazed at her for a long moment before calling out softly, 'She said that. . . about a slave?'

  'She has eyes,' Atara said sadly. 'She is a woman, and a widow at that.'

  'Yes, but she should not even have been looking at a Hajarim.'

  Atara smiled again and said, 'If I still had eyes, what would I see when I looked at you? Not a Hajarim. There are no such ones in our company.'

  And with that she found his hand and took hold of it. She brought it up to her face. He needed only the slightest encouragement to touch the golden hair of her eyebrows and then let his fingertips come to rest in the empty spaces beneath. She sat I on her log while he knelt before her, face to face, for what seemed almost forever. I heard their breaths rise and fall in perfect rhythm with each other. Then a deep desire that she usually kept hidden poured out of her like a stream of glowing white iron. I could not tell if it was longing or lust or love - or perhaps all three. I did not know if Bemossed could feel her burning passion for life as I did, like a white-hot sword thrust through my belly. He was like a man discovering a new land of beauty and wonder. He kept touching his fingertips to her eye hollows, oblivious of time, oblivious of me. I doubted if he purposed to inflame my jealousy; I doubted as well that he would have acted otherwise solely because it distressed me.

  In truth, I sensed much in his encounter with Atara that distressed him. His fingers and hands began trembling, and he seemed barely able to contain his own blazing passions. If the sun shone all day and all night, I thought, it would incinerate everything that it touched. I felt him again clamping down on the desire that surged through him, this time closing off his heart. After resting his hand upon her cheek, he finally broke off touching her altogether. He wrapped a new blindfold for her, and tied it around her head. Then he went off to help Estrella comb the mud out of the horses' coats.

  Later that night, before bed, I stood with Atara in the moonlight. As it had been for most of the miles since the Skadarak, she still seemed totally bli
nd. I said to her, 'Maram's wound is no better - do you feel anything, where Bemossed touched you?'

  She rested her fingers on her blindfold and laughed out, 'I think you feel something that you needn't. You've no cause for worry on this account.'

  'I'm not worried,' I told her.

  She reached out to grasp my hand as when I had first met her and we sat together beneath the stars. She said to me, 'Bemossed would be an easy man to love, I think, but never as I do you. He is like the brother I never had.'

  She kissed me on the lips, lightly, and then went off to sleep inside the cart with Liljana and Estrella. I lay down by the fire, staring up for hours at the silver moon and the bright arrays of stars. A single question burned through my mind deep into my soul: Why did it seem to be Bemossed's fate to heal in love and light, while mine drove me on to strike my sword into others and slay?

  In the morning we set out again to the east. The road led slightly downhill toward the low country around the Iona River. As I drove the cart, Bemossed sat on the seat opposite me, with Estrella in between. For hours, he said nothing. He tried not to look at Atara, riding along on her roan mare ahead of us, or at me. He stared out at the fields of cotton and the rice bogs, and the occasional stretches of forest, and I wondered if his service to various masters had ever taken him through this steamy country. I fell him brooding over matters that he would not speak of. I sensed in him an anguish of the soul which, strangely, he seemed to cherish and hold onto, as he did other dark moods and sensations. I thought he was too much at home inside himself with all the colon of his feelings: the blue of his awe and sorrow for the world; the violet of his unfulfilled desire; the red of his great anger toward me.

  For most of his life, I thought, he had necessarily looked to himself alone for any succor or understanding. But with his touching of Atara, some deep drive to trust others seemed to open inside him. As the miles passed behind us that long, hot day, I sensed him finding a deep accord with Estrella, and she with him. He spoke to her of little things, which she smiled at or commented upon with a flutter of her fingers or an arching of her eyebrows. And she seemed to speak to him. And not just to him but of him: her lovely, open face shone as brightly as any mirror, reflecting the glories of his soul that she found within him. Without being conscious of this talent, I thought, she showed me Bemossed's kindness, his compassion, generosity, fire and an otherworldly grace.