David Zindell - Black Jade

I closed my fist around the black jade, with its sharp facets. I walked back toward the cottage, where I found two good-sized stones. I set the black jade on the flatter of these. Then I used the other stone as a hammer to smash the fragile gelstei into pieces.

'What shall we do now?' Daj asked, coming over to me.

I looked at Bemossed holding Estrella's hand in the strong light raining down from the heavens, and I smiled at Daj. I told him, 'Now we will go home.'

I turned to mount Altaru and begin the long journey back toward the lands from which we had come.

We rode only a couple of hours after that, for we were all exhausted and the ground soon grew even hillier and more rocky. We wanted, though, to place a good few miles between us and the cottage in case any of the Red Capes did return. We finally made camp in a cluster of rocks above a stream flowing down from the mountains. Although the ground was almost too hard for sleeping, sleep we all did — all of us except Kane. He stood guard over us with his bow strung, watching the moonlit swells of ground below us. But nobody pursued us that night, not even in our dreams.

When morning came, the sun rose in the east, all golden and glorious. So, it seemed, with Bemossed. He moved with a new purpose, and he smiled more, as if all that he looked upon pleased him. His eyes shone with a new light. In the coming days, I looked for it to fade, but it did not.

Just before we set out for the secret pass, as Master Juwain was changing the dressing of the wound in Maram's chest that had never healed, Bemossed came over to Maram. He set his hand directly upon the raw, red wound, and Maram cried out as the salts of Bemossed's skin burned him. Bemossed left his hand there even so, for a long time. And when he took it away, Maram's flesh had been made whole again.

'Oh — oh, my Lord!' Maram shouted, pushing out his chest to the sky. 'I am healed!'

He hugged Bemossed to him in a crushing embrace, and then began dancing about the rocks half-naked. He whooped for joy, and then said to Bemossed, 'You are the Maitreya, truly you are, and nothing is impossible now!'

This, however, proved not to be so. Bemossed proceeded to lay his hands over Atara's face and then Estrella's throat. But even after an hour of great effort, Estrella still could not find words to speak, and Atara's eye hollows remained empty.

'I'm sorry,' Bemossed said to Atara. He bowed his head to Estrella. 'I've failed you.'

Despite Atara's disappointment, she clasped his hand and told him, 'You could never fail me. There must be many things beyond the power even of a Maitreya.'

She smiled at him, sadly and wistfully, and yet with great gladness, too. She seemed happier than she had been in a long time.

'What could be beyond the power of the Shining One?' Maram exulted as he thumped his chest and gazed at Bemossed. 'The perfect power of a perfect, perfect man!'

Bemossed blinked his dark eyes as his lips tightened with anger. He said to Maram, 'Whatever power passes through me might be perfect, but I certainly am not.'

Maram, though, only waved his hand at the sunlit rocks and the green grass all about us, and said, 'Today, everything is perfect!'

Bemossed rolled his eyes in exasperation, and couldn't help smiling at him. Then turned to me and said, 'You understand, don't you?'

I gazed at him, and his face gleamed with all his kindness, goodness and his bright, soaring spirit. But the deep light that filled him now also illumined his restlessness, obstinacy and his anguish of life — and all his other flaws. And the more brilliantly it shone, the clearer and sharper these flaws seemed to be.

'Give it time,' I said to him, clapping him on his shoulder. I looked from Atara to Estrella. 'My brother, Asaru, was the finest knight Mesh has ever seen, but even he didn't learn to wield a sword all in one day.'

Bemossed considered this. It was strange, I thought, that even in the depths of a dark, brooding silence, something inside him seemed to sing with light.

'Val is right,' Master Juwain said, coming up to Bemossed. 'All that I have read about the Maitreya leads me to believe that his gift must be trained like that of any other man.'

Bemossed nodded his head as his face brightened once again. 'All right, then let us leave this land and go where I might find such training.'

After that, we saddled our horses and rode until we entered the band of forest beyond the pasture country. We saw no sign of Red Capes hunting us, or indeed, of anyone. Birds sang out from the trees in abundance, and deer browsed on the bushes, but if any people had ever dwelt here, they had many years since fled for other places. We made our way through the rugged, rising hills toward the pass that Atuan had told of. We found it only with difficulty: a sharp and treacherous break in the mountains that was more of a crack splitting naked rock than a true pass. We had to work our way through it walking our horses in single file. It snaked north and east, and it took all our care to negotiate it without any of our horses — or us — stumbling and breaking a leg. Finally, though, after a long, hard work, we came out into the great bowl of lowland where we once again looked upon the city of Senta. Great, jagged peaks rose up in a ring of white for miles around us.

Maram gazed out at the wheatfields to the south of Senta's houses and buildings, at the rocky prominence called Mount Miru. There, the opening of the Singing Caves led down into the earth. He told me, 'I would look upon this marvel. I would hear the angels sing.'

But this, too, was not to be. We held council, and we decided that going into the caverns once again might prove too dangerous.

'So,' Kane said, 'King Yulmar might not welcome us, since we left a slaughter on the caverns' doorstep the last time we came this way.'

Liljana nodded her head and added, 'We must do all that we can to slip past Senta without alerting the Kallimun's priests or their spies.'

'But we defeated the Kallimun — again!' Maram said. 'And killed the greatest monster that Morjin ever sent after us! We vanquished the Tar Harath, to say nothing of Jezi Yaga or the Skadarak. And we found the Lord of Light! We should go into the caverns to sing of our deeds!'

'Didn't you tell me,' I said to him, 'that you never wanted to go down into the earth again?'

'Ah, well, I suppose I did,' he said. He looked at Bemossed. 'But that was then.'

In the end, however, Maram saw the reason of our arguments, and he grudgingly accepted the need for prudence. It was, as he said, the greatest disappointments of his life. It consoled him somewhat that he had Alphanderry the greatest minstrel of the age, to sing for him in the caverns' stead.

'I'll come back,' he promised himself, looking up at Mount Miru.

'Someday, Morjin will be finally and utterly defeated and I'll come back and make a true pilgrimage here.'

We spent most of that day crossing the tiny kingdom of Senta, or rather, skirting it, for we rode in a great circle around Senta's farmland and forests, keeping close to the mountains. We encoun-tered only a woodcutter and a few farmers, who gave us leave to cross their fields. At the end of the day, we made camp m a wood northeast of the city, just below the pyramid mountain that had pointed our way toward Senta. We spent the next morning working our way up through the pass around this icy peak, and so we left the civilized realms of Ea's far west behind us.

We came down into the thick forest of that wild upland where no people lived. For the rest of that day and part of the next, we picked our way with great care ever downward, searching through the trees and huge rocks for the road by which we had approached Senta. Kane had an excellent memory for terrain, and so did I. and so we had no trouble finding this road, in its broken segments, or the long valley through which it led. The Valley of Death, Maram called it, for it disquieted him to wonder what had happened to the people who had once lived here. But as before, on our journey toward Hesperu, this broad, green swath through the earth proved to be just the opposite, for we took from it ripe apples and wild, golden wheat, as well as antelopes and boar and other game that sustained our lives.