Liljana came over with a cloth soaked in an infusion made from kokun leaves, which was the only thing that eased the pain of Maram's flesh, at least for a time. She washed his body and tended his wounds with a gentleness that surprised me.
I expected that having suffered this new outrage that had nearly killed him, Maram might call for us to return to the Avari's hadrah. Instead he called for brandy.
'Ah, Master Juwain,' he said, tapping his hand lightly over his chest, 'it was you who drilled this hole in me, and so it is upon you to fill it in the only way that will truly help.'
So great was Master Juwain's guilt that he did not gainsay Maram's request. None of us did. Master Juwain poured much more than a few drams of brandy into Maram's cup, then watched as Maram drank it slowly.
'Thank you, sir,' Maram said. He sat up and ran his finger around the bowl of his cup, then licked it. 'You've made a new man of me.'
He held out his cup and gazed at the bottle of brandy that Master Juwain held in his gnarled hand.
'No, no more,' Master Juwain told him. 'At least not now. If you need a little at the end of the day, you shall have it.'
'Do you promise?'
'Yes, I suppose if I have to, I do promise.'
Maram's eyes gleamed, and a new strength flowed into him. I watched with amazement as he suddenly stood up to begin dressing. Our gelstei might hold undreamed-of powers I but so it seemed did a bottle of brandy.
We waited out the worst heat of the day there at the well, trying to sleep inside our stifling tents. When the killing sun had dropped much lower in the sky, we set out again to the west. We journeyed long past dusk and deep into a new series of hills, whose sharp ridgelines ran north and south. Maram counted out the miles like a miser adding coins to a vault. But we all knew that at the day's end, like a spendthrift, he would exchange them all in return for what had become his nightly libation.
Late that evening, we pitched our tent in a narrow valley between two of these lines of hills. Master Juwain noted that many of the stones in the valley seemed rounded, as of river stones. He worried that if a storm came up, the walls of rock around us might funnel the rain into a flashflood that could drown us.
'If it stormed, we would be swept away,' Maidro said to him. 'And if we had wings, we could simply fly out of here; indeed, we could fly clear across the desert.'
Arthayn and Nuradayn laughed at this as if they thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. Sunji looked up at the glittering sky, unmarred by even a single cloud. And Maidro, taking pity on Master Juwain, added, 'In Segadar and Yaradar it rains here, torrents and rivers. But never in Soldru for as long as the Avari have lived in the desert. So sleep in peace, Master Healer.'
That night, after Master Juwain had rewarded Maram as promised, we all slept in relative peace, if not in comfort. The rocks sticking out of the ground bruised us, even beneath our thick furs, and the air fell almost icy cold. Maram stirred in his sleep and awakened more than once, moaning at the new pain in his chest. In the hills around us, the hyenas let loose their eerie cries.
Maram, when it came time to ride again, surprised me by saddling his horse without grumbling. As he told me in the dark of the morning before true morning: 'Forty miles we'll cover today, if it's a good day, and the sooner they are behind us, the sooner I shall have my brandy.'
For a few hours, as we worked our way across the highlands, we rode through near-darkness. Then the sun's first rays lit the hills with a golden-red lire. The rocks about us seemed to glow. Sunji, following an ancient route, led us up through a cleft between two hills as stark and barren as the moon. They were, he said, the last of this high country, and they marked the westernmost reaches of the Avari's realm.
'Now you will see,' he told me, turning on his horse toward me, 'what few men have seen.'
We came out on top of the cleft to behold the vast reaches of desert that opened out to the north, south and west. The wind, over the ages, had swept up the sand into mountains. Some of it shone white as the fine, shell-ground sand along a beach; some of it gleamed as red as the sandstone pinnacles and castle-like formations that stood even higher than the great dunes. In places, to the north, the sun fell upon swirls of red sand embedded in white and caused the dunes to glow with a lovely pink hue unlike anything I had ever seen. The sky framed this magnificent landscape with a blue so rich and deep it seemed almost like water. It was all so impossibly beautiful that I wanted |u» weep.
'The Tar Harath,', Sunji said to me. 'The womb of the desert.' 'It is … so lovely,' I said.
'It won't seem so in another three hours.' He pointed his finger out at the endless sweeps of sand. 'Not once we're out on the Hell's Anvil.'
'Ah, how far did you say it was across this?' Maram asked. 'No one really knows,' Sunji told him. 'It would be far, even if we were to ride as straight as an eagle flies. But if we must turn north or south in search of water, then. .'
He did not finish his sentence. And so Maram could not calculate how many forty-mile segments he must complete in order to earn his rations of brandy. In any case, as Maidro explained, we couldn't always count on making forty miles in a day.
'There might be sandstorms that we'll have to wait out,' he said. 'and that will eat up the hours — and eat the flesh off our bones if we're impatient. There are quicksands, too, that we must avoid. The sand itself will tire the horses' legs, ours too when we walk, and so the journey will go more slowly.'
He said nothing about the sun, which made its way up the great arc of the sky like a white-hot iron cinder. But Master Juwain had already explained to us that in the desert the air held too little moisture to shield against the sun. And here, in the deep desert, the air was so thin and dry that the sun's fierce rays burned through it like starfire through the great nothingness of space.
For a while, as we worked down into the Tar Harath, the hills at our back blocked out the sun. But then we rode out onto the sand, and the sun rose higher. It streaked down upon us like a rain of flaming arrows. The sand threw it back into the air so that it seemed that we rode through a wall of flame. The air here was indeed thin — but not so thin that we couldn't feel it searing us through our coverings of wool. We rode past mid-morning, and it grew even hotter. And still the sun rose higher and brighter and hotter. It flared so hellishly hot that we stopped to pitch our tents. Climbing inside them provided protection from the sun, but did nothing to help us escape from the terrible heat.
'It is like breathing fire!' Maram gasped out a couple of hours past noon. He lay sweating on top of his furs, unable to sleep. 'It is like being cooked inside an oven!'
Master Juwain, Daj, Kane and I sprawled out on our furs near him. My robes were a sodden mass of wool smothering me.
'I can't stop sweating,' Maram complained. 'It seems I'm taking a bath with all my clothes on.'
'Do you see this?' Kane said, kneeling over him. He ran his finger through the sweat pooling on Maram's forehead. 'This is all that is keeping you from cooking. Your body is no different than other kinds of meat. Heat it up enough and it will roast like lamb.'
I did not want to think that the Tar Harath could grow so hot — or indeed, any hotter at all. But late in the afternoon, as we were readying ourselves for the second half of the day's journey, Maidro stood in his steaming woolen robe and shrugged his shoulders. 'This is still only Soldru — wait until Marud when grows really hot.'
How does one measure heat? An iron thrust into a bed of coals will glow red before white, but the searing agony of red-hot iron held against the flesh is scarcely any less terrible, as Master Juwain could attest. Some say that the dry heat of the desert is not so bad as the swelter of more humid climes such as the jungles of Uskudar, but I say that these wayfarers have never ventured into the Tar Harath. There is a heat on earth so hellishly hot that it drives burning nails into the lungs even as it nearly poaches the brain. Beyond this degree of anguish, it can grow no hotter, for if it did a man would die.
Tha
t evening, on our ride into the coolness of the descending dark, I knew that all of our thoughts were on death. Sunji and Maidro fell into a deep silence, seeming to concentrate on finding the best route across the soft, shifting sand. I felt within them a deep longing, as for water, but I sensed that it was really a concentration on the need of life. They knew better than any of us how easily the desert could snuff it out. Both the children fought to master their suffering and fear, even as Master Juwain struggled not to play through his overactive mind multifarious scenarios of doom. It was Liljana's will, I thought, that if she could just manage to fill our bodies with good food and our spirits with good cheer, then no doom could touch us. Maram, of course, sought other means of dealing with the great, inescapable darkness. As for Kane, with his fathomless black eyes and great soul, it was his way to take death inside himself and laugh out to the stars his defiance and glee.
I worried most about Atara, not just because I loved her beyond all beauty and goodness, but because she revealed to me the least. She sat on top of her red mare swaddled in her robes and blindfold as beneath a tent of silence. Outside, the air still swirled up off the ground, dry and warm, but inside this brave woman welled a terrible coldness.
We made camp that night with one of the desert's sandstone castles at our back. Dunes had swept over part of this rock formation, but great mounds of rock two hundred feet high stuck up out of the sand. After our dinner of dried lamb and wheat cakes, Atara asked me to accompany her in a short climb up to the rocks behind us. Arm in arm, with Atara pushing her bow down into the sand with each step, we walked up along the crest of one of these dunes. We came upon some flat rocks and sat down facing the desert to the west. In the glittering black distances, Valura, the bright evening star, had almost set.
'I must speak to you,' Atara said to me, 'before it is too late.'
She had taken off her head covering so that only her blindfold remained. I gazed at the gleam of starlight on her face as I took her hand in mine. Her skin, like the rocks around us, was quickly losing its heat to the night.
'I was wrong,' she said, 'after the battle in that canyon. To call for the priest to be staked out to die in the sun — so horribly, horribly wrong. I called it justice. It was only justice, truly. But who of us desires that? Who would wish it upon herself?'
'Not I,' I said.
I thought of all the men I had slain — and of their widowed wives, vengeful brothers and children left with no one to protect or provide for them. I thought of my brothers, and my father and mother, and all my friends and countrymen who had died because I had told a single lie.
'It's kindness we need,' she said to me. 'And forgiveness.'
'But you've done nothing for which you need to be forgiven. Nothing more than anyone.'
'Haven't I? In the Skadarak — '
'Let's not speak of that place here,' I said to her. 'We've trials and torments enough ahead of us.'
'We do. You can't imagine.. '
I looked at her and said, 'Tell me, then.'
'No, I'm sorry, I can't tell you. I can't even tell myself.'
I felt a coldness pulsing through her wrist, and I said, 'I've never seen you like this before.'
She fell quiet as she seemed to listen to the wind rattling sand against the rocks around us. Then she said, 'I'm so afraid. So horribly, horribly afraid.'
'You?'
She nodded her head. 'I think we will all die. And worse, before we die.'
I gripped her hand too tightly. It was one thing when Maram voiced such sentiments; it was another when Atara, greatest of scryers, spoke of such doom.
'You won't tell anyone I said that, will you? Especially not the children. I'm so afraid for the children.'
'As long as we're all right,' I reassured her, 'they will be all right.'
This, I thought, was something that Liljana might say. Too often, it seemed a little lie that I told myself.
'I'm so useless, now,' Atara said to me. 'I failed you again in the battle with the droghul. His voice! The Voice of Ice, the Avari call it. I should have fired an arrow through his throat!'
'It will all come back,' I said to her, squeezing her hand. 'Your sight, and more — I know it will.'
She shook her head at this, and fell again into silence. Her whole body seemed ready to shiver against the cold, driving wind.
'In the Skadarak,' she murmured, 'did you never think of leaving me behind?'
'No — I could never leave you!'
I would die, I told myself, a thousand times to keep her alive.
She sat shaking her head. The coldness spread out from her center into her limbs and hands. Her fingers pressed hard against mine as if feeling for something deep and indestructible.
'I think you could have,' she said to me. 'No — never!'
'I think that any of us could,' she said. 'There's always a choice, isn't there? These terrible, terrible choices of life. We're always so close to making the wrong choice. It's always there, the yes and the no, and I can't get away from it. It's like trying to flee from Morjin: the farther we go into the wilds of Ea, the more surely he finds us out and the nearer he seems. But I must escape it, don't you see? I can't live with the horror of it all.'
I listened to her breath push in and out of her chest. I said, 'But you must live. You can't give up — I won't allow it.'
Her voice softened as she said, 'You won't? Then help me, please.' 'How?'
She reached down to grab up a handful of sand. She sat letting the grains run through her fingers onto the rocks below us. 'What others feel inside them, you are able to feel, too. Sometimes, you can even touch them with your fire, your dreams. Can you not, then, take their nightmares away?'
I slowly shook my head. 'I'm not the Maitreya, Atara. And I'm not sure that even he could do as you say.'
'Please,' she said, leaning against me. She let her head rest against my shoulder. 'I'm so tired.'
She pressed her hand into mine, and I felt the cool, grittiness of sand as well as the stirring of a deeper and warmer thing.
'I'm so tired,' she murmured, 'of being tired.'
Her head pressed me like a great weight. The smell of her hair was musky and heavy.
'Take me away,' she said to me. 'Back to the Avail's hadrah — or even back to Mesh. Somewhere safe.'
I felt my heart beating hard up through my throat as I said, 'But nowhere in the world is safe for us now. We've spoken of this. Eventually — '
'I don't care what happens ten years from now, or even next month. I just want to be a safe for a single night. For an hour — why can't it all just go away?'
Why, indeed, I wondered as I sat listening to Atara's heavy breathing and looking out at the stars?
'Val, Val,' she said to me.
I was no scryer, but even so a vision came-to me: of Atara and I going back to the Avari's hadrah to live in peace. We would wed, despite Atara's misgivings, and bear a child whom she could never behold. We might be happy, for a time, but sorrows would inevitably come for us. Atara would grow to hate rearing our son in blindness, and hate me for calling him into life. And most of all, she would hate life itself, especially when Morjin finally found us and our world became a nightmare.
Her fingers pulled at mine with a quiet, desperate urgency. I couldn't move; it seemed that I could hardly breathe. Only our thin coverings of skin kept the fire of my blood from burning into her, and hers into me.
'No,' I whispered.
It was as if I had slapped her face. The coldness suddenly flooded back into her, and she sat up straight.
'No,' she repeated, 'we always have a choice, don't we? You're so damn noble, you always choose what you do, even though someday, it will kill you.'
'Atara, I — '
'It will kill all of us, I'm afraid. It might. And I have to accept that, don't I? Because that's the beautiful, beautiful thing about you, that those of us who love you can't help choosing as we do, too.'
For a while, she sat there quietly
weeping into the wind, and she would not let me touch her. I had a strange sense that she was almost glad that her eyes had been put out so that I couldn't see the pain and horror in them. Then she regathered her composure; in a clear, calm voice, she said to me, 'Tell me what you see then, in the deep desert to the west, where we must go.'
I described the sweeps of sand and rock in the dark distances before us. Then I stared out at the infinite black bowl of the sky and said, 'There are stars — so many stars. Never, not even on top of Mount Telshar, have I seen them so brilliant.'
Valura, I told her, gleamed like a bright diamond just at the edge of the horizon, while Icesse and Hyanne and the stars of the Mother hung higher in the sky. Although she could not see my finger, I pointed out Ahanu, the Eye of the Bull, and Helaku and Shinkun and a dozen other stars. Solaru and Aras, I said, shone more splendidly than any others; they were like blazing signposts lighting our way.
'And there,' I said as I moved my hand in an arc across the heavens, 'are the Seven Sisters. And beyond, the Golden Band, filling the blackness with glorre. I can almost see it. Sometimes, I do. It shimmers. It is strange, the way its light touches that of the stars and makes them seem even brighter. Now I know the real reason that the Avari go into the Tar Harath.'
I fell quiet as I looked into the black, brilliant deeps for Shavashar and Elianora, Ayasha and Yarashan and Asaru, and the other stars that called to me with the voices of my dead family. I called back to them, whispering their names: 'Karshur, Mandru, Ravar, Jonathay. .'
My voice shook with longing. I heard it and hated it. I said to Atara: 'In all the sky, there isn't a single cloud. It's all so perfectly clear — clearer even than your crystal.'
'Is it? Tell me what you see in the sky, then.'
"Triumph. A great light unveiled. At the end of it all, the whole earth singing of what we have done. I see the one whom we seek. I see you, looking at me the way you once did. You will see again — I know you will.'
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