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‘No, you did not!’
His voice softened then as he told me, ‘Listen to me, my young friend: we do what we have to do, eh? Just don’t be so sure it’s always easy to know what is evil and what is not.’
And with that, he stalked off back toward our encampment.
I waited with my drawn sword, watching the world turn into darkness.
I breathed in the smells of grass and woodfire and the fresh blood of a lion’s kill wafting on the wind. I sensed many things. The horses standing in their small herd nearby were all exhausted and would have a hard time when morning came. I quivered with the fear of the field mice as they looked for the owls who hunted them, and my heart leaped with the gladness of the wolves as they followed the scent of their prey. And in all this immense anguish and zest, I thought, in all this incessant struggle and striving there was no evil but only the terrible beauty of life. It was too much for me to take in, too much for any man. And yet I must, for the stars, too, had a kind of life: deeper and wilder and infinite in duration. How, I wondered, would I ever feel my mother’s breath upon my face or hear Asaru laughing again if I could not open myself to this eternal flame?
Just then Atara appeared out of the glare of our campfire and walked closer to me. Then she called out: ‘Val, your face – your sword!’
To be open to love, I knew, is to be vulnerable to hate.
‘Morjin is out there,’ I said to her. My sword glowed red like an ember as I pointed it toward our enemy. ‘Can you “see” him?’
Atara drew out her scryer’s crystal and stood rolling it between her hands. She said, ‘Everywhere I look now, Morjin is there. It is why I am loath to look.’
‘Your gift,’ I told her, ‘is a curse. As is mine.’
I went on to relate my conversation with Kane. She came up close to me and grasped my hand. ‘No, it is just the opposite. Kane was right: you have yet to learn how to use the valarda.’
I wrenched free my hand and said, ‘If I could, I would cut it out of me, the way I’ve cut off others’ hands and carved out their hearts.’
‘No – please don’t say that!’
‘Such terrible things I have done! And what is yet to come?’
I stared at the Red Knights’ campfires, then Atara touched my cheek to turn my face toward her. And she said to me, ‘I don’t know what is to come, strange though you might think it. But I know what has been. And I know where I have been, with my gift.’
She held up her gelstei: a little white sphere gleaming beneath the white circle of the moon. ‘I’ve tried to tell you what it is like to see as I have seen. To live. Such glory! So much light! Truly, there are infinite possibilities, the dreams of the stars waiting to be made real. I’ve seen them all, inside this crystal. And here, for too long, I have dwelled. It is splendid, beyond the beating of a butterfly’s wings or the sun rising over the sea. But it is cold. It is like being frozen in ice at the top of a mountain as high as the stars. And all the time, I am so utterly, utterly alone.’
‘A curse,’ I said softly as I covered her crystal with my hand.
‘No! You don’t see! The price of such beauty has been such terrible isolation – almost too terrible to bear. But I have borne it, even gloried in it, because of you. Your gift. You are such a gift, Valashu. You have a heart of fire, and it is so brilliantly, brilliantly beautiful! Is there any ice it could not melt? No, I know – only you. You bring me back into the world, where everything is warm and sweet. I don’t want to know what it would be like to live without you. You are the one being with whom I do not feel alone.’
Her hand was warm against mine. Because she had no eyes, she could not weep. And so I wept for her instead.
‘Kane has suggested,’ I finally told her, ‘that I should use the valarda to manipulate Bajorak. Like a puppeteer pulling on strings.’
She smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘Kane is so knowing. But sometimes, so willfully blind.’
‘How should I use the valarda, then?’
‘You know,’ she said to me. Her voice was as cool and gentle as the wind. ‘You’ve always known, and you always will know, when the time comes.’
I looked out at the millions of stars shimmering through the night. The black sky could hold their splendor, but how could any man?
‘And now,’ she said to me, ‘you should get some rest. Tomorrow will be a long day, and a bad one, I think. Come to bed, Val.’
She pulled at my hand to lead me back to our camp. But I let go of her to grip my sword, and I told her, ‘In a moment.’
I watched her walk back to the fire as she had come, and I marvelled yet again that she could find her way without the use of her eyes. I wondered then how I would ever find my own way to whatever end awaited me. I gazed at Alkaladur, whose silustria glistered with dark reds and violets. The Sword of Fate, men called it. How should I point it, I wondered, toward all that was good, beautiful and true? I wondered, too, if I would ever be free of the valarda. I had spoken of using my sword to make a brutal surgery upon myself, but I might as well try to cut away my face, my limbs and all my flesh – no less my memories and dreams – and hope to remain Valashu Elahad.
‘So, just so,’ I whispered.
And with this sudden affirmation, my heart opened, and my sword filled with the light of the stars. Then, to my astonishment, its substance began radiating a pure and deep glorre. This was the secret color inside all others, the true color that was their source. It flared with all the fire of red and shone as numinously as midnight blue, and yet these essences – and those of the other colors it contained – were not just multiple and distinct but somehow one. Kane called it the color of the angels, and said that it belonged far away across the heavens, in the splendor of the constellations near the Golden Band, but not yet here on earth. For most men had neither the eyes nor the heart to behold it.
‘So bright,’ I whispered. ‘Too bright.’
I, too, could not bear the beauty of this color for very long. And so as the world continued its journey into night and carried the brilliant stars into the west, I watched as the glorre bled away, and the radiance of my sword dimmed and died.
I returned to the fire after that and lay down on my furs to sleep. But I could not. As my sword remained within its sheath, waiting to be drawn, I knew that the glorre abided somewhere inside me. But would I ever find the grace to call upon it?
3 (#ulink_91eab8bf-8cb5-512f-88db-bdab770d8aa7)
The next day’s dawn came upon the world with a red, unwelcome glare. We ate a hasty breakfast of rushk cakes smeared in jelly and some goose eggs that Liljana had reserved for especially difficult work. And our riding that morning, while not nearly so fast or jolting as that of the previous day, was difficult enough. We set out parallel to the mountains, and our course here took us southeast over ground humped with many hummocks and rocky crests. We crossed streams all icy cold and swollen into raging brown torrents that ran down from the great peaks above us. All of us, I thought, rode stiffly. We struggled to keep our tired horses moving at a good pace. Often I wondered at the need, for no matter how quickly or slowly we progressed, our enemy in their carmine-colored armor kept always a mile’s distance behind us.
‘Surely they don’t intend to attack us,’ Maram puffed out as he nudged his horse up beside me. ‘Unless Bajorak is right and they are only waiting for reinforcements.’
Toward this contingency, Bajorak had sent forth outriders to search the grassy swells and sweeps of the Wendrush.
‘Of course,’ Maram added, ‘it seems most likely that they only intend to follow us into the mountains.’
‘We cannot go into the mountains,’ I told him, ‘so long as they do follow us.’
‘Ah, it seems we cannot go at all unless we find this Kul Kavaakurk. Where is this gorge, then? How do we know it really exists?’
Maram kept on complaining at the uncertainties of our new quest as his eyes searched the folds and fissures of the rocky earth to our right. His voice boomed out into the morning, and Master Juwain caught wind of our conversation. He rode up to us and told Maram, ‘It surely does exist.’
‘Ah, sir, but you are a man of faith.’
‘I have faith in our Brotherhood’s lore.’
‘But, sir,’ Maram reminded him, ‘it is our Brotherhood no longer.’
‘And that is precisely why you are ignorant of this lore.’
‘Lore or fables?’
‘The Way Rhymes are certainly no fables,’ Master Juwain said. ‘They are as true as the stories in the Great Book of the Ages. But they are not for the common man.’
He went on to speak of that body of esoteric knowledge entrusted only to the masters of the Brotherhood. As he often did when riding – or sitting, standing or even sleeping – he clutched in his hand his travelling volume of the Saganom Elu.
‘Ah, well,’ Maram said to him, ‘one of the things that I could never abide about the Brotherhood was this madness for books.’
‘A love for books, you mean.’
‘No, it is more of a bibliolatry.’
‘But the Way Rhymes are recorded in no book!’
‘And that is precisely the point,’ Maram said, needling him. ‘The Brotherhood makes an idol of the very idea of a book.’
Master Juwain’s homely face screwed up in distress. ‘It is one of the noblest ideas of man!’
‘So noble that you withhold this lore from men? Should not all that is best and most true be recorded in the Saganom Elu?’
Now Master Juwain’s lips tightened with real pain. And he held up his worn book as he tried to explain to Maram: ‘But all is recorded there! You must understand, however, that this rendering of the Saganom Elu is only for men. It is said that the Elijin have a truer telling of things, recorded on tablets of gold. And the Galadin as well have theirs, deeper and truer still, perhaps etched in diamond or read in starfire, for they are deathless and cannot be harmed, and so it must be with their writings. And the Ieldra! What can any man say of those whose being is pure light? Only this: that their knowledge must be the brightest reflection of the one and true Saganom Elu, the word of the One which existed before even the stars – and which was never created and therefore cannot be destroyed.’
For a while, as our horses made their way over the uneven ground at a bone-bruising trot, Master Juwain continued to wax eloquent as his ideals soared. And then Maram rudely brought him back to earth.
‘What I always detested about the Brotherhood,’ Maram said, ‘was that you always kept secrets from lesser men – even from aspirants such as I when I, ah, still aspired to be other than I am.’
‘But we’ve had to protect our secrets!’ Master Juwain told him. ‘And so protect those who are not ready for them. Is a child given fire to play with? What would most men do if given the power of the Red Dragon?’
I turned in my saddle to look at the Red Knights trailing us as if bound to our horses with chains. I wondered yet again if Morjin rode with them; I wondered what he would do with the unfathomable power of the Lightstone.
Maram must have sensed the trajectory of my concerns, for he said to Master Juwain: ‘And so like precious gems, like gelstei hidden in lost castles, you encode these precious secrets in your rhymes?’
‘Even as we encode the way to our greatest school.’
Maram sighed at this, and he sucked at his lip as if wishing for a drink of brandy. ‘Tell me again the verses that tell of this school.’
Now it was Master Juwain’s turn to sigh as he said, ‘You’ve an excellent ear for verse when you put yourself to it.’
‘Ah, well, I suppose I should put myself since you have honored me with this precious lore that you say is no fable.’
‘It is not a question of honor,’ Master Juwain told him. ‘If I fall before we reach the school, at least one of us must know the verse. Now listen well and try to remember this:
Between the Oro and the Jade
Where sun at edge of grass is laid,
Between the rocks like ass’s ears
The Kul Kavaakurk gorge appears.
Maram nodded his head as his fat lips moved silently. Then he looked at Master Juwain and said, ‘Well, the first two lines are clear enough, but what about the third? What about these “ass’s” ears?’
‘Why, that is certainly clear as well, isn’t it? Somewhere, at the edge of the steppe, we will find two rocks shaped like an ass’s ears framing the way toward the Kul Kavaakurk.’
‘Why two rocks, then?’
Master Juwain cast Maram a strained look as if he were being as dull and difficult as an ass. He said, ‘How many ears does an ass have?’
‘No more than two, I hope, or I would not want to see such a beast. But what if the line you told me was instead:
Between the rocks like asses’ ears
That could mean two asses or three, and so there could be four rocks or six – or even more.’
As Master Juwain pulled at his ruined ear, the one into which Morjin’s priest had stuck a red-hot iron, he gazed at the mountains to the west. And he said, ‘I’m afraid I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘And that is the problem with these Way Rhymes of yours. Since none of them are written down, how are we to make such distinctions?’
Master Juwain fell quiet as we trotted along. Then he thumped his book yet again and said to Maram, ‘The words in here are meant to be clear for any man to read. But the words in the Way Rhymes are only for the masters of the Brotherhood. And any master would know, as you should know, to apply Jaskar the Wise’s Scales to any conundrum.’
‘Scales?’ Maram said. ‘Are we now speaking of fish?’
‘Now you are being an ass!’ Master Juwain snapped out.
‘Ah, well, I must confess,’ Maram said, ‘that I do not remember anything about this Jaskar the Wise or his scales.’
‘Jaskar the Wise,’ Master Juwain reminded him, ‘was the Master Diviner and then Grandmaster of the Blue Brotherhood in the Age of Law. But never mind for right now who he was. We are concerned with the principle that he elucidated: that when faced with two or more equally logical alternatives, the simplest should be given the greatest weight.’
‘And so we are to look for an ass’s ears, and so two rocks and not four, is that right?’
‘I believe that is right.’
Maram covered his heavy brows with his hand as he scanned the great wall of the Nagarshath along our way. And he said, ‘I haven’t seen anything that looks like ears, those of an ass or any other beast, and we’ve come at least a hundred and forty miles from the Jade.’
‘And we’ve still another forty until we reach the Oro. And so we can deduce that we’ll come across this landmark between here and there.’
Maram looked behind at our pursuers and said, ‘Closer to here would be better than closer to there. I’m getting a bad feeling about all this. I hope we find these damn donkey’s ears, and soon.’
After that we rode even faster through the swishing grasses along the mountains, and so did the men who followed us. I, too, had a bad feeling about them, and it grew only hotter and more galling as the sun rose higher above us. I turned often to make sure that Karimah and her Manslayers covered our rear, just as I watched Bajorak and his Danladi warriors fanned out ahead of us. After brooding upon Master Juwain’s and Maram’s little argument and all that my friends had said to me the night before, I finally pushed Altaru forward at a gallop so that I might hold counsel with this strong-willed headman of the Tarun clan.
After pounding across the stone-strewn turf and accidentally trampling the nest of a meadowlark, I came up to Bajorak. He held up his hand and called for a halt then. When he saw the look in my eyes, he led me away from Pirraj and the huge Kashak and his other warriors. He reined in his horse near a large boulder about fifty yards from his men. And he said to me, ‘What is it, Valashu Elahad?’
For a moment I studied this great Sarni warrior, with his limbs, neck and head encircled in gold and his face painted with blue stripes like some sort of strange tiger. Most of all I looked deeply into his dazzling blue eyes. And then I asked him: ‘Do you know of two rocks, along the mountains, shaped like an ass’s ears? There would be a span between them – and possibly a stream or a river.’
His eyes grew brighter and even harder, like blue diamonds, as he stared at me. And he answered my question with a question: ‘Is that where we are to escort you then?’
‘Perhaps,’ I told him.
His fine face pulled into a scowl, and he snapped his braided, black quirt against his hand. ‘I know not of any ass’s ears, and I care not.’
I couldn’t keep down my disappointment, and he must have felt this for his eyes softened as he said, ‘But there are two great rocks like unto those you describe, about ten miles south of here. We call them the Red Shields. If that is your destination, however, you would have had a hard time finding it.’
‘Why so?’
‘Because the Shields face east, and we approach them from the northwest. From our vantage, we will see only their edges – and the rocks and trees on the slopes behind them.’
I continued gazing at him, and I finally asked, ‘Do these shields, then, guard a gorge cutting through the mountains?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I know not. No Sarni would ever journey into the mountains to find out.’
He turned to snap his quirt toward the mountains, and asked me, ‘What is the name of this gorge?’
