Black Jade

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.

That 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