Black Jade

Chapter 28

We remained in the Loikaiii's woods for two more days. I kept waiting for Alphanderry to fade back into the lesser splendor of Flick, but he seemed to grow only more and more real. Although he ate no food nor drank any drop of water, he walked through the woods like any other man, and he laughed and joked with us as we gathered stores for the remaining part of our journey.

We could not put this off any longer. We all dreaded leaving the shelter of the lovely trees to go out into the blazing hell of the Tar Harath. Maram especially moved with a sloth and sullenness hard to bear, cursing under his breath as he helped fill up the waterskins from one of the Loikaiii's pools. He cast numerous, longing looks at Anneli, who seemed loath to leave his side. His resentment weighed heavily upon me, as did the need to say farewell to Sunji and the Avari. There was no help for this. When we had stowed the last waterskin and bag of fresh cherries on the packhorses, in the coolness of a mid-Marud morning with the birds singing all around us, we held council with Sunji and his fellow warriors beneath an old, spreading astor tree.

'Your father,' I said to Sunji, 'enjoined you to help us cross the desert, but to go only as far as you must. You have come that far, perhaps even farther. Now you must return to tell King Jovayl of the great thing that you have done.'

While Maidro, Nurathayn and Arthayn regarded me with questioning looks, Sunji said, 'But you still have the rest of the Tar Harath to cross! And beyond that, the lands of the Yieshil'

And Maidro added, 'Who will warn you of sandstorms? Who will keep you from drowning in quicksands? Who will help you find water?'

This last question needed no answer, for everyone's gaze fell upon Estrella, who sat near Alphanderry's brilliant form playing some sort of game with him in the graceful movements of their fingers and hands. And I said to the Avari: 'We would never have reached this place without your help. But once we leave here, we journey to the mountains in the west, and beyond. If you were to go with us as far as the mountains, and then try to return by yourselves to your hadrah across the whole breadth of the Tar Harath, then you must take water again here, or die. Without Estrella to lead you, you would be unlikely to find these woods. This is too great a risk, and I cannot ask you to bear it.'

Sunji and his fellow warriors were brave men, but they were practical, too, as were all the peoples of the Red Desert. They saw the logic of what I said. Nuradyan, however, upon watching Estrella and Alphanderry with wonder, said, 'But we could go with you to the end of your quest!'

This, though, Sunji was unwilling to do. He said to Nuradayn, and to all of us: 'My father's wishes must be obeyed, and we must return home as soon as we can. In autumn, 'I think, there will be war with the Zuri. Valaysu is right, I think, that the Dragon will not leave the killing of his Red Priests unavenged. Valaysu has his battles, and we have ours.'

He stood up to embrace me then, and it surprised me to see tears flowing freely from his eyes.

'All right,' Maidro said, embracing me, too, 'then we must say farewell, and I will wish you well: May the One always lead you to water.'

Just then Oni surprised us by marching into the grove at the head of a contingent of the Loikalii, including Maira, Kalevi and three elders. Oni walked straight up to Estrella, and held out to her the blue, crystal bowl that was so clear to her. And she told her: 'Take this, that the One might always lead water to you.'

Estrella's hands closed around the little bowl, and she looked up at Oni with deep gratitude. Then Oni bent to kiss the top of her curly head. Since Estrella remained as mute as the trees around us, I spoke for her, saying to Oni, 'You have given us a great gift, perhaps even the gift of life itself. But how will you summon the rain without your gelstei?'

At this, Oni cast me one of her mysterious looks and said, 'Don't worry, giant man, we have our ways.'

Liljana, who was more practical than I, studied the gleaming blue bowl that Estrella held and said, 'But how will she know how to use it?'

Her question really needed no answer, for we had all found our way into our gelstei largely unaided. I thought Oni's response interesting, however, for she looked at the radiance streaming down through the golden astor leaves and said, 'How do the trees know how to use the light of the sun?'

When it came time to saddle the horses and leave the woods, another surprise awaited me, but this one was heartbreaking. Maram, holding Anneli's hand, strolled into the assembly place near our olinda trees and announced that he would not be coming with us.

'I'm sorry, Val, but I've come too far already, and it is too much — too, too much.'

We stood near the stamping horses. My heart beat with a sick thudding in my chest as I stared at Maram in disbelief. I could find no words to say.

'I'm sorry, my friends,' he said to all of us, 'but I just can't go on.'

He wiped at the corner of his eye, and would not look at me. It came to me that this was just another of his vastations, when doubt and fear worked at his insides and made jelly of his muscles and bones and his will to move himself in the right direction. As always, I believed, a brilliant fire would soon burn away his deepest affliction and leave a noble being standing straight and unvan-quishable. As always, I had only to light the torch.

'Maram,' I said, stepping up close to him to grasp his shoulder.

'No, no — do not look at me that way!'

How could I not look at this vain, vexatious yet great man whom I loved as much as I did anyone?

'Please, Val — this is too hard!'

As I searched for the right thing to say to him, Kane barked out at him: 'Watch that your courage doesn't fail you now!'

Atara stepped up to him and said, 'The worst of our journey is behind us.'

Liljana came over to touch her hand to his cheek. 'We know how you've suffered — who knows better than your friends? But it's almost over. I have to believe that.'

'No, no, it will never be over,' Maram said. 'I do not think you will ever find the Maitreya.'

He stood squeezing Anneli's hand and still would not look me.

'We need you, Maram,' I said at last. Estrella came over and pulled gently at his hand to indicate her intense desire that he should change his mind and journey on with ill Alphanderry told him of the great wonders of the world that he might experience if only he found the will to ride a few hundred more miles. Kane turned to me with a helpless look softening his savage face.

'Maram,' I said, again touching his shoulder.

He still ignored me, turning to unwrap his old traveling cloak from around his firestone. He lifted up this great, ruby crystal and said, 'I never really believed that this would be made whole again. I never believed that I would be made whole again. Can I hold love's bright flame? For a day or a year? That's all that really matters. In the end, it all comes down to love.'

His gaze fell in adoration upon Anneli for a moment and then finally met mine. All of his anguish came flooding into me. All of his dreams and desires filled me with a pain that I could not bear. I blinked my eyes against the burning there, and said to him, 'All right, Maram, stay if you must, and peace be with you.'

If I searched inside myself for the truth of things, hadn't I always known it would come to this?

'Don't look at me like that!' Maram called out to me again.

I could no longer bear for him to suffer, not another arrow wound to his flesh or a sunburn or a day of fruitless fighting an enemy that could not be defeated. I could not bear that his great heart should remain empty of that for which he most yearned. I said to him, 'Stay — take Anneli for your bride. Have children. Be happy, my friend.'

I looked at him as he looked at me, and I could not hold inside the bright, warm thing that made my heart hurt.

'Damn you, Val!' he said to me. 'You're cruel! You make it easy for me — and so make it hard. So damn, damn hard!'

We embraced each other then, and wept like boys. Then it came time to saddle the horses for rest of our journey. Maram watched me fasten the straps beneath Altaru's great body, and he said to me, 'Ah, surely I was wrong in what I said about the Maitreya. You will find him! And on your return, you'll pass back through these woods again — I know you will!'

He forced himself to smile, huge and deep, but I could tell that be did not believe what he had said. I, however had to act as if I believed it. And so with great gratitude we said farewell to the people of the forest. We mounted our horses and rode through the silent trees. When we came out upon the sands of the Tar Harath, a blast of terrible heat instantly burned the moisture from my eyes. There came another parting, as Sunji and the Avari turned south and east while we forced ourselves to point our mounts toward the great dunes gleaming in the west. Soon, the Avari were lost to our sight among the sweeps and swells of this vast country. Then the Loikalii's Vild vanished into the glare of the deepening distances. Never, not even after my family's death, had I felt so alone.

Over the next few days of our journey, my friends said little to me, for I could not bear the sound of their voices. Our lives settled into a harsh routine: strike our goat-hair tents hours before dawn and ride into the growing heat of the morning. When the air became a blazing furnace searing our eyes and sucking our bodies' moisture clean out of the fibers of the robes that the Avari had given us, we pitched our tents again and lay sweating and suffering until it came time to set out into the cooling air of the late afternoon. We plodded on across the evening's starlit sands; when exhaustion finally weakened us and the icy cold of deep night drove through our garments like knives, we crawled inside our tents yet again to take a few hours of sleep.

I led us on a straight course southwest toward the Crescent Mountains. No lesser mountains or rocky hills rose up out of the desert to impede us or to cause us to make a detour. The heat of the Tar Harath, after the cool greenery of the Loikalii's woods, seemed even more hellish than the baking misery that had so nearly killed us in the desert's easternmost reaches.

There seemed no end to it. Although I knew from the maps that we would eventually reach the great Crescent Mountains, and the Tar Harath give out many miles before that, my ears, eyes and heart told me differently. There was only desert in all directions, day after day. The wind blew particles of stinging sand across a sun-seared emptiness that seemed to go on forever. I turned often toward the direction that I imagined the Vild to lie, hoping that Maram might have changed his mind and that I might see him riding after us. I felt him close to me, his great heart booming out his remorse at deserting me and his desire to reunite in our quest But I searched the wavering sand behind us in vain.

We all, I thought, grieved Ma ram's absence; it was as if there was a hole in the earth where a great mountain had stood. One night, over dinner, Liljana admitted that she missed Ma ram's grumbling and drinking almost as much as she did his bawdy songs and unchainable zest for life. She had little appetite for the last of the cherries and other fresh fruit that we had taken from the Loikalii's woods. I had none. I sat staring at my untouched food; I sipped the few drams of brandy that I poured into my cup in remembrance of happier times. If we had lost one companion, however, we had gained another — almost — in Alphanderry. His presence did not fade with our passing from the Vild, nor did he often dissolve back into his old radiance as Flick. He 'rode' along with us on top of one of the packhorses, if that was the right word to describe the actions of a being who possessed neither solidity nor weight. I wondered if he could simply soar through the air like a brilliant bird or streak onward like the rays of the sun. it seemed, though, that such means of movement were impossible for him when he remained in his human form. As we neared the end of the Tar Harath, or so we hoped, Alphanderry rode or walked, even as we did.

He did not, however, eat or drink or sleep or sweat. If he suffered along with us, it was not from the world's hardships, at least not in their physical aspects, I sensed that he anguished over our anguish, as any good friend would. He, too, I thought, missed Maram. From his own memory of Maram and our descriptions of Maram's valor at the Siege of Khaisham and many times since, he composed lines that he called 'An Ode To A Five-Horned Man'. His voice, cool and flowing, refreshed us even more than water, and the song reminded us that Maram remained close to us, at least in spirit.

On the fourth night since our leaving the Loikalii's forest, we gathered around a single candle that Liljana had lit. Kane sat plucking the mandolet's strings while Alphanderry sang of the time when Maram had mistaken a bear licking honey from his face for one of his lovers. When Alphanderry had finished and the wind came whooshing out of the west, we spoke yet again of the mystery of Alphanderry's existence. Daj wondered how it was possible for this almost-real being woven of light to possess Alphanderry's very real memories.

It was Liljana who tried to answer him. In the words that poured out of her, I heard her fervor for the wisdom and teachings of her ancient order: 'All men and women die, for they are born from the world and must return to it. But the world itself never dies — not unless one such as Angra Mainyu comes with fire to destroy it. We are all of this immortal world. Not just in the water of our blood or in the minerals of our bones, but in our thoughts, our passions and our dreams. And in our memories. My Sisters of old believed that all we ever experience, the world experiences, too. As we remember, so does the world remember. Should it not be, then, that as the world remembers, we remember? Ea is Alphanderry's mother, and it must be that She, herself, whispers these memories in his mind. It must be that she has the power to remake him in greater glory, even as She once gave him birth.'

Master Juwain twirling his cursed varistei between his fingers, said, 'I believe that Liljana is right. In spirit, she is right. But I think there is much more to this matter than she has told. Alphanderry is of this world, as is water or light or the crystal of the gelstei, whose deepest structure we may never understand. But surely he is something more, too. Something from beyond the world. It is said that once the Galadin walked upon Ea, and left some part of their shining substance behind in the Lokalani's Vilds — what else can the Timpum really be? Unless the Timpum are even more than this: some part or impulse of the Ieldra themselves. My Brotherhood teaches that the Ieldra dwell ft the bright, black emptiness of Ninsun, at the center of all things. Everything dwells there: all time, all space, all matter, all memory. The universe itself, not just the world, remembers all that is and has ever occurred, down to the tumbling points on the tiniest grain of sand driven by a whirlwind. The Akashic Memory, my order has named this record. Over the ages, a few masters of my Brotherhood have been able to call upon a wisdom and memories far beyond themselves. It must be these memories, some special part, that Alphanderry calls upon to make his verses. It must be from these memories that the Shining Ones somehow make him.'

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 found 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.

'Father, what is she doing?'

This question came from Lia, a girl about Estrella's age.

It was Daj who answered Lia, saying: 'She is summoning rain.'

Manoj and his family must have thought Daj mad after all, and Estrella more so, for she stood gazing in the direction of the setting sun and did not move. Almost immediately, however, the wind began blowing out of the west. It built quickly and unrelentingly to nearly the force of a gale, and drove sand in a stinging brown blanket across the Yiehsi's encampment.

I shielded my eyes and watched awed as the first dark clouds appeared on the horizon; the wind drove them straight toward us at an astonishing speed. The air fell colder and moister, and ran with electric currents. Whips of lightning cracked down from the clouds, splitting the ground with flashes of brilliant white-orange fire. Then the sky above us grew nearly as black as night. Manoj's children fled into the comfort of their mother's and grandmother's robes, but they could give them no protection from this wild storm.

A great thunderbolt shook the earth beneath us, and a strange burning smell charged the air.

And then the clouds opened, unleashing rain in sheets and streams. It rained so hard that we could scarcely breathe. Our robes quickly soaked through as if plunged into a lake. We cringed and shivered against the icy torrents raging down from above us.

Then Kane let loose a great laugh that tore from his lungs like a thunder of his own. He stood and stripped off his useless clothing, standing naked beneath the black sky. He raised back his head as he opened his mouth and let the rain pour down his throat. He I raised his hands straight up as if summoning the heaven's lightning himself. To Manoj, he must have seemed as mad as the world about us. But Kane was the first of us to seize the moment, grabbing up waterskins from the terrified horses and opening them to the deluge. It alarmed me how quickly the skins swelled with water.

The ground beneath us, too, began overflowing like a suddenly rising lake. If this storm had caught us in a ravine, raging rivers of water would surely have drowned us; as it was, I feared that this ancient basin might prove a deathtrap if it rained much longer, for there was no drainage here and the sky seemed to hold entire oceans of water. I shouted at Estrella to put down her bowl; she did not hear me. She remained standing against the storm's ferocity with her eyes closed and her arms frozen out, holding up the blue bowl. The rain had now filled it many times over, and water poured from it as from an infinite source. I ran over to her then. I eased the bowl out of her cold fingers, and tried to cover her with my robe. She finally opened her eyes. Her smile drove through the storm like the sun.

Soon after that, it stopped raining. The clouds broke apart, blew away and vanished into the blueness of the twilight sky. The desert about the well had been changed into a wetlands of pools, puddles and water holes drilled down into acres of mud. Rani, with bucket in hand, discovered that the well was full — fuller than it had ever been before, even in the months of winter.

'Rain in Marud!' she marveled, looking about the well. 'You are not pilgrims, but sorcerers!'

Then she gazed at Estrella in awe. 'No, I should call you instead a water witch as lived in the ancient ages — a worker of miracles!'

That night, in honor of miracles, Manoj slaughtered his fattest goat and roasted it beneath the light of the moon. The fire, made from moist, woody thornbush dried our garments even as the

greasy smoke worked its way into our skin and hair. We ate succulent meat and goat cheese. Manoj fed Estrella choice tidbits from his own hand and wanted to know how she had called up the storm. So did Master Juwain.

Bui their words only amused Estrella. She suddenly hooked together her thumbs, shiny with goat grease, and moved her fingers up and down around them as of the flapping of wings. Her face came alive with a succession of delightful expressions, and she made other signs, with her fingers and hands. Daj interpreted this mysterious language as best he could, telling Master Juwain; 'It is like this, sir: everything touches upon everything else. And so even the tiniest act can ripple out into the world with great effects. The beating of a butterfly's wings can cause a whirlwind a thousand miles away. I think Estrella has found a way to be that butterfly.'

Manoj considered this as he called for Rani to pour some fermented goat's milk for us to drink. He looked at Estrella and said, 'Well, then, little butterfly — where will you fly to next?'

I sensed that he wished to follow us on our quest, to see what other miracles Estrella might bring forth. For his sake, and ours, I told him only that we sought a wondrous source of healing deep in the mountains.

'In Sandar?' he asked us.

Sandar, I thought, letting that name's sounds play out inside me. Could he mean Senta? For nearly a thousand miles we had debated our route into Hesperu. Once we had decided on crossing the Red Desert and the Crescent Mountains, it seemed wisest to go down into the north of Hesperu through Senta in the mountains' southern part. A good road, we knew, led from Senta through that difficult terrain. But how we were to negotiate the even more difficult terrain between the edge of the desert and Senta had remained a mystery.

'You must be bound for Sandar,' Manoj said to us. 'Like the pilgrims of old.'

Senta, of course, had drawn pilgrims from across Ea for ages: all from roads leading from Surrapam, Sunguru or Hesperu itself. We knew of no ancient route from the Yieshi's lands to this fabled city.

Master Juwain regarded Manoj with his clear, old eyes as he rubbed the back of his head and asked. 'And how did the ancient pilgrims find their way to Sandar?'

'From the Dead City.'

The puzzled look that Master.Juwain traded with Kane caused Manoj to add: 'It was once called Souzam. It is said that there is a road leading out of there to the west — at least there was once. No Yieshi would ever go into the mountains to find out if this is true.'

Further questioning prompted Manoj to tell Master Juwain that the Dead City, or Souzam, lay only a hundred miles from his well at the foot of the Crescent Mountains.

'But if you are considering journeying that way,' Manoj told us, 'do not. Do not go into the mountains at all, I beg you.' 'Why not?' I asked him.

'Because the mountains arc cursed,' he told me. 'The Dead People dwell there.'

Fate, it seemed, after slinging fire and arrows at us for too long, had at last opened a door to better fortune. The gleam in Master Juwain's and Kane's eyes, no less my own, told me that we would indeed journey at least as far as the Dead City to see what we might see.

We stayed up late that night, for the ground was too wet for easy sleeping. Manoj had many old tales that he wished to share with us — and many that he wished to hear. After his third cup of fermented milk, we finally got him to tell us exactly how we might find the Dead City. Just before dawn, we arose to say goodbye to him and his family. And he told us: 'I would ride with you, as far as the mountains, to see that you are safe. But I must remain here to make sure that my wife and children are safe. The Zuri have raided into our lands, and although I do not think they would come this far in Marud, it is said that sorcerers have poisoned the mind of Tatuk and now direct his decisions. I would make war upon the Zuri before they grow too bold, but my cousins have disputed the need.'

As I stood by Altaru, who was happy at having drunk gallons of fresh water, I clapped Manoj on the arm and told him: 'Remain here then, and keep your family safe. And keep your sword sharp, Yieshi.'

We rode off into the desert to the west. Estrella's rain had made the desiccated rock grass and bitterbroom magically green. Brilliant pink flowers bloomed from the thornbush. The sandrunners, rabbits, lizards and other desert creatures all seemed restored to new life.

All that day and the next we travelled toward the mountains, following the landmarks that Manoj had described to us. We found the second Yieshi well, too. It was not dry but full. We drank from it and topped up our waterskins, and continued on our way. The mountains came into view and built before us, ever higher, ever clearer, shadowed in purple and capped in white. On our third day out from Manoj's well, we came upon Souzam, which he had called the Dead City. It seemed nothing more than a few acres of ancient stone buildings and mud-brick houses half-buried in sand. Most of the streets were broken, and the stones of a great aqueduct's arch had long since cracked and fallen apart. It seemed that no one had lived here for ten thousand years. A quick search turned up some hyenas making a den in one of the buildings, but we came across no other inhabitants.

We found the road that Manoj had told of easily enough, although it, too, was nearly buried in sand and its paving stones cracked in a thousand places. We followed it out of the city, up into the bone dry foothills. It wound up through a canyon. On its rugged slopes grew thornbush and other plants that we had seen for too many miles. From the rounded stones strung out in a snaking curve along the bottom of the canyon, we saw that once a stream or river had flowed here.

As we worked our way higher, the sands of the stream bed darkened with moistness. The tough desert vegetation gave way to juniper, cottonwoods and the first pine trees. Master Juwain remarked upon the extremes of the Crescent Mountains: in the range's western slopes, running from Surrapam down into Hesperu, the mountains caught the wet winds of the oceans and wrung out the rain. And there grew the lushest, greenest forests in the world. Its eastern slopes, as we now saw, were nearly as dry as the desert beyond. But they became moister and cooler with every mile higher that we climbed into the mountains.

We camped that night in sight of a great, white-capped peak. We ate some goat cheese and drank our water in good confidence that we would soon find more. That morning, a few miles higher, the stream bed filled with mud; a few miles higher still, a trickle of water flowed down to the desert that it would never quite reach. By midafternoon the trickle had become a good-sized stream. And then, almost without warning, we came up around the curve of a mountain into a beautiful valley full of aspen trees, wildflowers, miles of thick green grass and herds of antelope that grazed upon it — into heaven.