Black Jade ec-3

by David Zindell

  We all sat on our horses as we considered the next leg of our journey. Master Juwain, upon studying the lay of the land, turned to Daj and said:

  Recall the tale or go astray: King Koru-Ki set sail this way.

  'Well, young Dajarian — which way is that?'

  And Daj told him: 'North, I think. Didn't King Koru-Ki set out to find the Northern Passage and the way to the stars?'

  'You know he did,' Liljana said to him. 'Didn't I teach you that the ancients believed that the waters of all worlds flow into each other? And that there is a passage to other worlds at the uttermost north of ours?'

  As Daj looked at Liljana, he slowly nodded his head.

  'Very good, then,' Master Juwain said. He smiled at Maram. 'We'll turn north, tomorrow — are we agreed?'

  'Ah, we were agreed before we reached this place. This Rhyme, at least, was easy to unravel.'

  'Indeed it was. But the Rhymes grow more difficult, the nearer we approach our destination. Let's make camp here tonight and ponder them.'

  And so we did. That evening, after dinner, I heard Maram repeating the verses to the Way Rhymes as well as those of his epic doggerel that he insisted on adding to. Over the next few days, as we continued our journey, the Way Rhymes, at least, guided us through the maze of mountains, valleys and chasms that made up this section of the lower Nagarshath. Through forests of elm and oak, and swaths of blue spruce, we rode our horses up and up — and then down and down. But as the miles vanished behind us, it became clear that our way wound more up than down, and we worked on gradually higher. Each camp that we made, it seemed, was colder than the preceding one. On our fourth day after the King's Divide, as we called it, it rained all that afternoon and turned to snow in the evening. We spent a miserable night heaping wood on the fire and huddling as close to its leaping flames as we dared, swaddled in our cloaks like newborns. The next day, however, the sun came out and fired the snow-dusted rocks and trees with a brilliance like unto millions of diamonds. It did not take long for spring's heat to melt away this fluffy white veneer. We rode up a long valley full of deer, voles and singing birds, and we basked in Ashte's warmth.

  And then, just past noon, we came upon a landmark told of by the Rhymes. Master Juwain pointed to the right as he said, 'Brother Maram, will you please give us the pertinent verses?'

  And Maram, making no objection to being so addressed, said:

  Upon a hill a castle rock.

  Abode of eagle, kite and hawk.

  From sandstone palisades espy

  A tri-kul lake as blue as sky.

  As Altaru lowered his head to feed upon the rich spring grass blanketing the ground, I sat on top of his broad back and stroked his neck. And I gazed up at the hill under study. A jagged sandstone ridge ran along its crest up to some block-like rocks at the very top, giving it the appearance of a castle's battlements.

  'This is surely the place,' Maram said, holding his hand against his forehead. 'But I see no eagles here.'

  And then Daj, who had nearly the keenest eyes of all of all of us, pointed to the left of the hill at a dark speck gliding through the air and said, 'Isn't that a hawk?'

  And Kane said, 'So, it is, lad — and a goshawk at that.'

  'If I were an eagle,' I said, looking at the crags around us, 'I think I would make my aerie here.'

  'If you were an eagle,' Maram told me, pointing to the north, 'you wouldn't have to climb that hill to spy out the terrain beyond it, as the verse suggests.'

  'You mean, we wouldn't have to climb it, don't you?'

  'I? I?' Maram said. He rested his hands upon his belly and looked at me. 'Surely you're not suggesting that I dismount and haul my poor, tired body up that — '

  'Yes, I am.'

  'But such ascents were made for eagles or rock goats, not bulls such as I.'

  'Bulls, hmmph,' Atara said from on top of her horse. 'You eat enough for an elephant.'

  Maram ignored this jibe and said to me, 'You are the man of the mountains.'

  'Yes,' I said, 'and so I'll go with you. And then you can recite for me the next verse.'

  Maram sighed at this as he grudgingly nodded his head. We decided then that Maram, Master Juwain and I would climb the hill while Liljana and the others worked on preparing lunch for our return.

  Our hike up the hill proved to be neither as long or arduous as Maram feared. Even so, he puffed and panted his way up a deer trail and then cursed as he nearly turned an ankle on some loose rocks in a mound of scree. To hear him grunting and groaning, one might have thought he was about to die from the effort. But I was sure he suffered so loudly mainly to impress me. And to remind both him and me of the great sacrifices that he was willing to make on my behalf.

  At last, we gained the crest, where the wind blew quickly and cooled our sweat-soaked garments. We stood resting against the sandstone ridge that topped it. We looked out to the northwest where a great massif of snow-covered peaks rose up along the horizon like an impenetrable white fortress. But between there and here lay a country of rugged hills and lakes that pooled beneath them. All of them were blue. Which one might be the lake told of in the Rhyme, I could not say.

  'A tri-kul lake,' Maram intoned, looking out below us. 'Very well, but what is that? A "kul" is a pass or a gorge, and I can't say that any of these lakes is surrounded by three such, or even one.'

  'Are you sure the verse told of a tri-kul lake?' Master Juwain asked him.

  'Are you saying I misheard the Rhyme?'

  'Indeed you did. The word in question is drakul.'

  'But why didn't you correct me before this?'

  'Because,' Master Juwain said, 'I wanted to give you a chance to puzzle through the Rhymes yourself. Our goal will never be won through memory alone.'

  'But what is a drakul then? I've never heard of such a thing.'

  'Are you sure? Think back to your lessons in ancient Ardik.'

  'Do you mean, try to remember lessons in that dry, dry tongue that I tried to forget, even years ago?'

  Master Juwain sighed and rubbed his head, now covered with a wool cap. And he said, 'Why don't you give me the next verses, then? How many times have I told you that clues to a puzzle in one verse might be found in those before or after it?'

  'Very well,' Maram said. And he dutifully recited:

  The Lake's two tongues are rippling rills

  That twist and hiss past saw-toothed hills;

  A cold tongue licks the setting sun.

  But your course cleaves the shining one.

  'No, no,' Master Juwain said to him. 'You've misheard the final line here, too. It should be: "Your course cleaves the shaida one".'

  'Shaida?' Maram called out. His great voice was sucked up by the howling wind. 'But what is that?'

  'Think back on your lessons — do you not remember?'

  'No.'

  Master Juwain dragged his fingernails across the rough sandstone beneath his hand, then turned to me. 'Val, do you remember?'

  I thought for a moment and said, 'Shaida is a word from a much older language that was incorporated into ancient Ardik, wasn't it? Didn't it have something to do with dragons?'

  Master Juwain smiled as he nodded his head. And then here, at the top of this windy hill, where hawks circled high above us he took a few minutes to repeat a lesson that he must have taught us when we were boys. Two paths, he told us, led to the One. The first path was that of the animals and growing things, and it was a simple one: the primeval harmony of life. The second path, however, was followed only by man — and the dragons. Only these two beings. Master Juwain said, pitted themselves against nature and sought to dominate or master it: man with all his intelligence and yearning for a better world and the dragon with pride and fire. Indeed, because men forged iron ore into steel ploughshares or swords and wielded the coruscating fury of the firestones themselves, our way also was called the Way of the Dragon. It was a hard way, perilous and cruel for it led to war and discord with the world — and seemingly even with
the One. But out of such strife. Master Juwain claimed like the great Kundalini working his way up through the chakras, would eventually emerge a higher harmony,

  'The Star People surely know a paradise that we can only imagine, the Elijin and Galadin, too,' Master Juwain told us. 'That is, they would if not for Angra Mainyu and those who followed him. Their way, I'm afraid, is still our way, and we call it the Left Hand Path.'

  Here he nodded at Maram. 'And now you have all the clues you need to unlock these verses.'

  Maram thought for a long few moments, pulling at his beard as he looked out at the blue sky and the even bluer lakes gleaming beneath it. And then he pointed west at the longest of them and said, 'All right, then, surely we are to espy a drakul lake, and of all these waters, only that one looks very much like a dragon — or a snake. And, see, two streams lead down into it, or rather away from it, past those saw-toothed hills. They do look something like tongues, I suppose. And so I would say that we're to follow the southernmost stream, to the left.'

  'Very good.' Master Juwain said, nodding his head. 'I concur.'

  Our course being set, we hiked back down the hill and sat down to a lunch of fried goose eggs and wheat bread toasted over a little fire. Then we checked the horses' loads and led them around the base of the hill topped by the castle rock. We worked our way through thick woods, and up and down the ravines that grooved the hill's slopes. Finally we came out into the valley of the lakes on the other side. We made camp that evening in clear sight of the dragon lake to the west of us. Its two tongues, of dusk-reddened water, caught; the fire of the setting sun.

  It took us most of the next day to reach this lake, for we had to forge on past other hills, lakes and ground grown boggy from all the water that collected here. But reach it we did, and we began our trek through the dense vegetation of its southern shore. We paused for the night in a copse of great birch trees. We smelled the faint reek of a skunk and listened to the honking of the geese and the beating wings of other waterfowl out on the lake. The next day we walked on until we came to the stream told of in the Rhymes. We followed this rushing rill toward its source south, and then curving west and north. The hills around us grew ever higher. In this way, over the next two days, we made a miles-wide circle and came up behind the great massif that we had sighted from the sandstone castle. And then, as the Rhymes also told, we came upon a road that snaked back and forth still higher, winding up through barren tundra toward what seemed a snow-locked pass between two of the massif's mountains.

  'Ah, I don't like the look of this,' Maram said as we stood by our horses looking up at the white peaks before us. 'It's too damn high!'

  'But we don't have to go over the pass,' Daj said, 'just through it.'

  'I don't care — it's still too high. It will be cold up there, cold enough to freeze our breath, I think. And what if there are bears?'

  He went on complaining in a like manner for a while before he turned his disgruntlement to the road we must follow up to the heights. It was an ancient road and seemed once to have been a good one, built of finely-cut granite stones taken from the rock around us. Some of these stones, though worn, were still jointed perfectly. But time and ice and snow had riven many of the stones and reduced the road in places to no more than a path of rubble. Below us the road simply vanished into a wall of forest and the dark earth from which it grew. We could detect no sign of where this road might come from. Above us the road led on: through the mountains, we hoped, and straight to the Brotherhood's secret school.

  'Well, I suppose we should camp here for the night,' Maram said.

  'No, I'm afraid we must go up as high as we can,' Master Juwain told him, pointing at the great saddle between the two mountains. 'You have the verses — give them to me, please.'

  Maram nodded grudgingly, then recited:

  Approach the wall round Ashte's ides -

  There wait till dark of night subsides;

  If sky is clear, at day's first light

  Go deep into a darker night.

  'But we have approached the wall!' Maram said to Master Juwain.

  'Not close enough. The essence of these verses, I think, is that we must be ready to move quickly at the right moment. Now let us go on.'

  And so we did. Our slog up the road was long and hard, though not particularly dangerous. As Maram had worried, it grew colder. The road passed through a swath of pines and broke out from tree-line into tundra. Ragged patches of snow blanketed the side of the mountain and covered the road in several places. We had to break through the crust and work against the snow's crunching, cornlike granules. Our feet, even through our boots, smarted sharply and then grew numb. The wind drove at us from the west in cruel, piercing gusts. But the sky, at least, was a great, blue dome and remained perfectly clear in all directions. And the sun comforted us for while — until it dropped behind the sharp-ridged peaks of the mountains farther to the west. Then it grew truly cold, enough to ice our sweaty garments and find our flesh beneath them. By the time we set to making camp at the crest of the road, we were all miserable and shivering.

  Maram pointed at the pass, where the road disappeared into a dark tunnel cut through the white wall above us. And he said, 'We would be warmer if we slept inside there.'

  'We would,' Daj agreed, 'but the Rhyme says that we're supposed to wait out here.'

  'The damn Rhymes,' Maram muttered. 'They make no sense.' 'But that's just it,' Daj said, 'we're supposed to make sense of them.'

  Atara began unloading some faggots of wood from one of the packhorses, and she said to Maram, 'It would be warmer in the tunnel. If there are any bears on this mountain, I'm sure they've made lair there.'

  'Bears?' Maram said. 'No, no — surely they've come out of their winter sleep and have gone down to feed on berries or trout. Surely they have. They at least have sense.'

  He set to unloading wood and building a fire with a fervor that kept away his gut-churning fear of bears. But he must have remembered the great white bear that had attacked us on a similar pass in the Morning Mountains — as did Master Juwain and I. We said nothing of this maddened animal that Morjin had made into a ghul, for we did not wish to frighten the children, or ourselves. I prayed that no ghul-bears — nor snow tigers nor any other beasts directed by Morjin — would find us here. It was enough that we still had to fight our way through this rugged terrain and through the Rhymes that were our map to it.

  We sat for most of thjnight by the fire. The ground here was too steeply sloped and rocky for reclining, and too cold, too And so we made cushions of over sleeping furs and huddled together with our cloaks thrown over us as a sort of woolen tent. Estrella sat between me and Atara, and fell asleep with her head resting against my side. Maram's back pressed firmly and warmly against my own. In this way, we propped each up and kept away the worst of the cold.

  I slept only a little that night, and Master Juwain and Kane did not sleep at all. At times, in low voices, they discussed the meaning of the Way Rhymes; at other times they sat in silence as they looked up at the stars. I kept watch on these bright points of light as best I could. But I must have dozed, for I awakened in the deep of night to the weight of Kane's hand gently shaking my shoulder. He stood above me uncloaked, and he pointed up at the constellations spread across the heavens.

  'Look, Val,' he murmured. 'The Ram is about to set.'

  In the biting cold, we roused the others and broke camp. This required little more work than heaping a few handfuls of snow upon the fire's coals and tying our rolled-up sleeping furs to the backs of the horses. We breakfasted on some battle biscuits and a little cold water to wash them down. And then we waited.

  As the last stars of the Ram set behind the western horizon, a faint light suffused the world and touched the mountains around us with an eerie sheen. At a nod from Master Juwain, we lit the torches that we had readied for this moment. And then without wasting another breath, we set out up the road and into the tunnel.

  None of us knew what we
would find there. The tunnel's stark-ness and long straight lines were almost a disappointment. The road through it seemed good and solid, and the horses' hooves clopping against the paving stones sent echoes reverberating up and down around us. The light cast by our oily torches showed a tube seemingly melted through the mountain's rock. The curving walls and ceiling above us gleamed all glassy and black, like sheets of obsidian more than fused granite. Maram guessed that the Ymanir must have once burned this tunnel with great firestones, for those shaggy giants had once ranged through most of the White Mountains and had built through them underground cities, invisible bridges and other garvels. Surely, I thought, this tunnel must be one of them. As we made our way down its gentle slope, I could see no end to it. Who but the Ymanir, I wondered, could carve a miles-long tunnel out of solid rock?

  'How I do miss Ymiru,' Maram called out into the cold, still air. 'He was a broody man, it's true, but the only one I've ever known bigger and stronger than I. A great companion, he was, too. If he were here, I'm sure he could explain the mystery of this damn tunnel and what we'll find when we come out on the other side.'

  'But we have the Rhyme for that,' Master Juwain said to him. 'Why don't you recite it?'

  'Ah, you recite it,' Maram said to him. 'My head has never worked right at this accursed hour.'

  'All right,' Master Juwain told him. And then he intoned:

  And through the long dark into dawn,

  The road goes down, yet up: go on!

  'Shhh, quiet now!' Kane called out to us in a low voice. 'We know nothing about this place or what might dwell here.'

  His words sobered us, and we moved on more quickly, and more quietly, too. It was freezing cold in this long tube through the earth, though mercifully there was no wind. After a few hundred yards or so we came upon yellowish bones strewn across the tunnel's floor and heaped into mounds. At the sight of them, Maram began shaking. The bones did not, however, look to be human; I whispered to Maram and the others that a snow tiger must have holed up here, dragging inside and devouring his kills. This did little to mollify Maram. As he walked his horse next to mine, he muttered, 'Snow tigers, is it? Oh, Lord, they're even worse than bears!'