Black Jade ec-3

by David Zindell

  Alphanderry, sitting across from me, listened respectfully to what Master Juwain said, though without particular concentration. He seemed not to care how he came to be, only that he somehow existed again. He took delight in this. His smile nearly lit up the night. He turned toward Daj and Estrella, who had not known him of old, and said, 'Master Juwain is wise in the ways of philosophy, and many other things, and we have much to learn from him. But creation might not be as much of a mystery as he makes it. Even the creation of a man. Daj, will you help me with this? Estrella?'

  As Estrella looked at Alphanderry in puzzlement, Daj asked him, 'What do you mean, sir?'

  'Please,' Alphanderry said to him, 'save the "sir" for masters of the Brotherhood and other illummaries. I'm just a maker of songs — and of men, as you will see and aid in the making. Now, this man who doesn't quite yet exist but somehow always exists whom we'll call into being — what is the first thing that we should know about him?'

  Daj's eyes brightened at being drawn into this diversion, and he said, 'I don't know — his name?'

  'Yes, good, good — his name. Well, what is it?'

  'But how should I know?'

  'Think, then!'

  As Daj closed his eyes as if running through a list of names of all the people he had ever known, Alphanderry reached out to tap him on his head. But since Daj could not feel the substance of his hand, Alphanderry called out to him instead: 'Do not think with this! Not in this matter. Think with that.'

  So saying, he laid his shimering hand over Daj's heart and smiled at him. And he added, 'Come on, quickly now, the name is there, and you know it!'

  And Daj blurted out: 'Might it be Aldarian?'

  'Good — a good name, noble and strong. A little dull, perhaps. Is our man dull?'

  'No, just the opposite. He is clever and cunning.'

  'Then we don't have his true name yet, do we?'

  A fire flared deep within Daj, and he called out with more certainty: 'His name is Eleikar!'

  'Hoy! Eleikar — so it is. Well, what does our Eleikar desire more than anything else?'

  And Daj told him: 'Vengeance! Eleikar's father was a great knight. A wicked king coveted his mother for a for a concubine, and when he could not have her, he killed Eleikar's father and took his mother anyway. To save her honor, Eleikar's mother poisoned herself.'

  'And what became of Eleikar?'

  'He fled with his brothers and sisters into the wilderness. The king's men hunted them down like pigs, sticking them with spears. They killed everyone except Eleikar.'

  'And how did Eleikar survive?'

  'By playing dead — even when the king's men stuck his face and legs for sport. The wolves of the forest rescued him. They licked his wounds and brought him fresh meat to eat. He lived with them, in a cave, until he grew into a man.'

  'Hoy,' Alphanderry said, nodding sadly, 'then Eleikar must have many scars.'

  'Many,' Daj said. He tapped his cheekbone and added, 'He bears one here, shaped like a crescent moon. He bears his father's scimitar, of the same shape, pis only desire is to get close enough to the king to im.it.'

  Alphanderry nodded his head again and asked, 'Is this his only desire?'

  As Daj fell into a puzzled silence, Alphanderry turned to Estrella and put the same question to her. She could not, of course, give voice to her answer. But her quicksilver eyes flowed with all her deep passion for life, and her fingers danced in that secret language of play and dreams that only Daj seemed to understand.

  At the frown that knitted Daj's eyebrows together, Alphanderry said to him: 'Well? Is vengeance all that he desires?'

  Daj scowled at Estrella and said, 'No, there is something else. It seems that Eleikar has fallen in love with the wicked king's daughter.'

  For another couple of hours, as the night deepened and the air fell bitterly cold, Alphanderry continued this game of quizzing the children and summoning out of near-nothingness a wild, star-crossed man named Eleikar. As their story built in elaboration and complexity, so did Eleikar gain his essential characteristics: bright, burning, sorrowful, adoring, doomed. He was a man who howled his wrath at the moon, and whispered to his beloved all of his overflowing joy of life. I winced to hear Daj declaim that Eleikar was immortal, not because Eleikar could not be slain, but because he would love as no man ever had before, and minstrels for many ages would sing of him. I marveled at how Eleikar came alive out of a few words spoken by a whip-scarred boy and the gestures of a mute slave girl, and seemed more real than many men I had known.

  It was a strange magic that Alphanderry wove, and while Kane smiled strangely at Alphanderry's unusual exercise, neither Master Juwain nor Liljana quite approved of it. Minstrels, to their way of thinking, sang of love or the beauty of the sea, or recounted the feats of ancient heroes who had really lived. Liljana scolded Alphanderry for trying to usurp the prerogatives of the Ieldra or even the One, saying to him: 'Your Eleikar moves according to your whims and designs, but it is not so with real men. With women, shaped after the image of Ea herself. We are all imbued with free will. Isn't this is the essence of what it means to be alive?'

  We all carried this question off to bed; I thought of little else over the hot, dusty miles of our journey the next day. Alphanderry's very existence seemed a window into the great mystery of life and death. I came to see him not as a challenger of the power of the Ieldra but as their fulfillment and gift. He, merely in being, was a promise that our lives were not lived in vain.

  Nothing is lost, I thought as I gazed at Alphanderry sitting happily on top of his swaying packhorse. The world must remember.

  I recalled the faces and voices of my family whom I had left behind in a place impossibly far away. A great hope came to me then. Truly, we each blazed with the bright flame of free will, and if we worked this will truly, then we might suffer or die but we would never fall to evil and be enslaved. And so we would somehow live, in honor and beauty, throughout eternity.

  Nothing is lost for the whole universe remembers.

  With this thought, however, as with ravening lions chasing a gazelle, came a terrible fear. I recalled what Kane had once told me: that two paths only wound their way into the mists of the future. Either men would become as angels, and the brightest of the Galadin would advance to the order of the Ieldra in a Great Progression known as the Valkariad, or Angra Mainyu and his kind would be freed from Damoom, and a darkness without end would befall the stars. But the Ieldra would not abide such total and final evil, and so they would destroy the stars and the whole universe of Eluru that contained them. Nothing of the universe would be left, and so nothing would remain to remember anything.

  All will be lost. It is not enough to choose freely and fight nobly. We must win.

  Triumph, however, seemed impossible without Maram at my side. As I gazed into the blood-red dunes where the sun died into the west, it took all my will to keep riding on as if any real hope still remained.

  That evening, as Liljana rationed out our water and Master Juwain morosely read from the Saganom Elu, I knew that I could not let them drown in the darkness of despair, much less the children. They needed to believe in a story where things came out right. So did I. Someday, perhaps, the minstrels would sing of my companions and me, and I would have them tell that we fought like the heroes of old to vanquish our enemies, down to our last breaths.

  And so I stood before the glowing candle, and I added my voice to the game that Alphanderry had begun, saying to Daj and Estrella: 'Eleikar must have his revenge upon the king, and he must love the princess, too, as the sun does the earth, for that is his fate. So it seems that it is his fate to live and die tragically. But perhaps there is more to Eleikar than we see.'

  'What, then?' Daj asked me.

  'That remains unknown. Perhaps it can't be known, by us. But Eleikar, if he is truly to come alive, might see what we cannot.'

  'But what could that be?'

  'A way out of his dilemma.'

  'But what if there is
no way out?'

  'There is always a way,' I told him. 'A king once said this to me: "How is it possible that the impossible is not only possible but inevitable?"'

  As the candle flicked and glozed, Daj pondered this, then said, 'I can't see the answer to that riddle, either. Perhaps I will by the time we reach Hesperu — if we ever do.' 'We will, Daj.'

  'Without Maram?'

  'Yes, if we have to, without Maram.'

  'Then you really believe that there is a chance we might find the Maitreya before Morjin does?'

  As I gazed up at the millions of lights above us, more splendid at the center of the Tar Harath than any place else on earth, something blazed inside me, and I said, 'We will find the Maitreya. And on our journey back to the Brotherhood School, we'll return to the Loikalii's woods. We'll sit with Maram again and eat raspberries- together. We'll bring him a bottle of the finest Hesperuk brandy and make a toast to love — I swear we will!'

  All of my friends looked up at me and smiled — everyone except Atara, who could not look at anything, and Liljana, who could not smile. But Atara's hand found mine and squeezed me tightly as she said, 'Val — I can see the Yieshi well! We will reach it! And beyond the desert, the mountains leading to Hesperu!'

  Although Liljana's face remained as. stern as stone, her eyes warmed even so. 'We still have a long way to go before we find this brandy you speak of, much less the Maitreya. Now, why don't we get some sleep, while we can?'

  The next day, our journey proved no less arduous than any other but we bore the pain of it in better spirits. Not until the day following did we finally came out of the Tar Harath into the western reaches of the Red Desert.

  We celebrated surviving the worst hell on earth by drinking the last of our water and gazing out optimistically into the country that opened before us. Here the dunes gave way to the harder

  sands of a pain nearly as flat as one of the skillets that Liljana had been forced to abandon. Here the air was cooler, slightly. Ursage and spiny sage grew in ragged clumps, and a few strands of rock-grass forced their way out of cracks in the ground. I watched a scorpion dragging a dead lizard through this grass, while farther to the west, in the air, a hawk soared over the desert. The sun remained a white-hot iron searing our eyes, but in its fierce light I found not the foreburn of death but rather the brightness of hope.

  'How far is it,' I asked Atara, riding over to her, 'to the Yieshi well?'

  'I'm not sure,' she told me from beneath the sweat-stained shawl that covered her face. 'I cannot see distances with my sight as you can with your eyes. But perhaps twenty miles.'

  From here, I guessed that it couldn't be more than a hundred and twenty miles to the mountains and the streams that we presumed we would find there. But without any water at all, it might as well have been a hundred and twenty thousand miles.

  By late morning, my mouth and throat had grown so dry, I could speak only in croaks, like a toad. By midafternoon, with the sweat soaking my robes, I could think of nothing but water. I was ready to try to chew the juices out of the bitter soap grass or even to bite open my horse's neck to drink down a little blood. The burning thirst of my friends made mine a hundred times worse.

  Then, near the day's end, we crested a swell of ground and found ourselves looking down into a depression that might have been made by the drying-up of a lake. Two black tents poked up against the brown, sun-baked earth. At the center of the depression stood the circular wall of rocks: the Yieshi's well. A half dozen of the Yieshi stood there, too, or so we presumed the dun-robed figures near the well to be.

  At the sight of us, just after Alphanderry had vanished into nothingness, one of them drew a saber that flashed in the late afternoon light. We rode closer, and I saw that he was about ten years older than I, with a face as sharp as obsidian and a scowl showing rows of white teeth. A young woman called to a boy tending some nearby goats, and then gathered two other children behind the meager protection of the well. An older woman with skin like dark, wrinkled leather hurried over to the well too. I guessed that she must be the man's mother.

  We rode even closer, and the eyes of all the Yieshi grew wide with astonishment. The man shouted out to us: 'Who are you? From where do you come?'

  Ten yards from the well, we all climbed down off our horses. I moistened my lips with some of the sweat pouring from Altaru's neck, and I croaked out to him: 'I am Mirustral, and we are pilgrims seeking the Well of Restoration. And we have come from the east, across the Tar Harath.'

  As I pointed behind us at the glowing duneland, the man's astonishment turned to disbelief. He shouted at me: 'No one crosses the Tar Harath! You are a liar — either that or the sun has made you mad!'

  'The sun has made me thirsty,' I said to him. 'And my friends, too. Have you any water to spare?'

  The man looked at the old woman standing behind the well, and then looked back at me. He shook his sword at me and said, 'For madmen we have none, for that would be a waste. And for liars, we have only steel!'

  Kane, perhaps even thirstier than I (and perhaps a little mad), whipped free his long kalama and advanced on the man. He growled out, 'So, we have steel for you, too! Let's see whose is quicker and sharper!'

  'Kane!' I called out. I moved to grab him, but he was too quick for me. And so I shouted, with greater force: 'Kane! Let us give them gold for their water,not steel!'

  Although the old woman's face brightened at this, it seemed that Kane hadn' heard me. He might have succeeded in quickly cutting down this bellicose man if Estrella hadn't sprinted forward, throwing her arms around Kane's waist and looking up with her dark, warm eyes as if pleading with Kane to put away his sword.

  Kane came to a halt and rested his hand on top of Estrella's head. He glared at the man with black eyes full of fire.

  Now Liljana came forward and walked past the' swords of both Kane and the startled Yieshi man, straight up to the well. She held out a gold coin to the old woman and said, 'We are neither mad nor liars — nor are we thieves. Why don't we sit together and tell our stories? At least let our children have a little water, if you've none for us.'

  As quick as an ostrakat pecking up a lizard, the old woman's hand darted out and snatched up the coin. Then her face softened, and she said to the younger woman: 'Let them have water, Rani.'

  The younger woman heaved a leather skin into the well. It made no splash but only sent up a sound like that of wet clothes beaten against a rock. Moments later Rani drew up a bucketful of muddy water that seemed more mud than water.

  'You shall all of you drink, not just your children,' the old woman said to me. 'But we've no water to spare for your horses.'

  After that Kane and the Yieshi man sheathed their swords. His name proved to be Manoj, and he presented to us his mother, Zarita, his wife and their children: Tareesh, Lia and Yiera. While Rani went to work filtering the well water through a filthy cloth, we sat on goatskins to tell our stories, even as Liljana had suggested.

  It took some time to get Manoj to speak, but when he finally did, he was cordial enough, if not friendly. He eyed Kane suspiciously as he told us that he had quarrelled with the cousins of his clan, who had gone on to the wells in the north to wait out the heat of the summer. Manoj, though, had chosen to remain alone with the rest of his family at this well, where they eked out a living from a few goats and sheep, and a little dirty water.

  When Rani had finished her work, she hefted up a waterskin and went around filling our cups, I didn't mind the earthy, slightly brackish taste of the water. In truth, I had to restrain myself from gulping down the precious liquid like a dog lest I spill a single drop on the dry ground.

  'Very well Mirustral,' Manoj said to me when I had drunk my fill, 'Now tell me how it is possible for pilgrims to cross the Tar Harath.'

  In the last heat of the day, I told him about the much greater heat of the deep desert and how the four Avari warriors had helped us survive it. Although I could not give away the secret of the Vild I admitted that we had f
ound water in a place where none believed water to be.

  'I've heard it said that there is water hidden by the dunes,' Manoj told us, 'but I never believed it. If this girl led you to it, then she is a treasure greater than gold.'

  He nodded his head at Estrella, who sat cupping Oni's blue bowl between her hands. Ever since we had left the Loikalii's woods, she had tried to unleash the gelstei's power.

  'Perhaps,' Manoj said, 'she will lead you to water in the miles between here and the mountains.'

  'Is there no other well in all that distance?'

  Manoj shook his head. 'There is a well but it is dry, stone dry, as it will remain until Ashavar, when the rains come.'

  I looked off into the west, at the dusty, dry folds of ground where bits of thombush and spike grass grew, I said, 'We cannot go on to look for more water without water now, for our horses.'

  I turned to watch Altaru sweating in the sun. It pained me that I had broken my promise to him by drinking before he did, but there was no help for it. I could not give him, or any of the horses, water that the Yieshi denied us.

  Manoj regarded him, too, and then looked at Atara's roan mare, Fire. He said, 'Those are fine horses, the best I have seen, even if too thin. We might find water for them, but we haven't enough for your other horses — we've barely enough to get us through the summer.'

  This, I thought, looking at Manoj's skinny goats grazing about, must be true. If his well ran dry, he and his family would perish. We could not buy or play upon his sympathies to yield up what he could not give us. But neither could we water Altaru and Fire and simply let our other horses die. 'I'm sorry, Mirustral,' Manoj told me.

  As it became clear that we remained in a desperate plight, Estrella squeezed her blue crystal with a surprising fierceness. Something inside her seemed suddenly to click, like an iron key fitting into a lock. She rose up and looked about her. She began walking, out into the desert where she came upon a low, flat rock near a thorn-bush. There she stood, facing west and holding up her blue bowl to the sky.