Black Jade

'No — he chooses one path over the other. He chooses infinite life.'

'But he dies!'

'No, he lives, truly lives, such as few ever do. Every moment in this realm, everything he touches: a rock, a tree, a child's face, blazing with the light of the One.'

'But he still must die. Why, then?'

Kane looked off into the star-silvered fields around us, and his face fell sad and strange with an ancient yearning. And he said to me, 'It is his gift to us. The Maitreya lives with a wild joy of life; he dies with equal delight. 'To gladly die', Valashu. It is this gladness that pours out through the Maitreya and the Lightstone in his hands, long before his end actually comes. It has great power. It fills the world, and all worlds, and joins the earth to the heavens. Of men it makes angels. It… heals.'

I could feel his heart beating quick and strong deep inside him with a rhythm that matched my own. And then he said to me, 'In such gladness, how can fear ever dwell?'

'His gift,' I whispered, looking up at the stars.

'And that is why,' Kane said, 'the Maitreya is always chosen of the Ardun. The higher orders have already set out on the path toward immortality. For the Elijin, theirs is not to die until their ending as Galadin in a new creation — not unless they are done in by accident or treachery first. As for the Valari, who have beheld the beauty of Star- Home, with their eyes or in their dreams — they have already taken one step through the doorway of everlasting life into another world. Is it not so with you?'

'Yes, it is so,' I said to him. 'I have stood with the true Valari, in a place where life was honored instead of death.'

'So — so have I, long ago.' Kane's jaws closed with a snap like that of a wolf, then ground together as the muscles beneath his cheeks popped out. Then he said, 'But the Maitreya's whole purpose in being is to show that there is no true death.'

''To live, I die,' I said, quoting from one of my father's favourite passages of the Saganom Elu. 'The faith of the Valari.'

Kane smiled at this as he looked at me. 'This, too, is said: 'They who die before they die — they do not die when they die.''

'I wish that I could believe that,' I said, swallowing against the hot acids burning the back of my throat.

'So, beliefs are useless,' Kane snarled at me. 'You must know it — or know it not.'

'I know this realm,' I said, looking out at the wheatfields of the Haraland. Somewhere down the road or across wide rivers, I knew that we would come upon other traitors or enemies such as Tarran. We would see soldiers hacked to pieces and grandmothers torn and bloodied, and men nailed to crosses of wood. 'If this is truly the same as the realm of the One, then why grieve death or the

need to kill?'

Kane's jaws clenched, and so did his fists. His eyes seemed to grow darker, like two black holes drilled into his savage face. For a moment, I thought he wanted to draw his sword and run me through with cold steel. And then something within him softened, and he said to me, 'That is Morjin's mistake — and Asangal's. I did not say that the two realms are identical, only not two. All that is, here on earth, the flowers and the butterflies, no less Morjin himself, are precious. Life is, Valashu — so infinitely precious. But so many live almost wholly within this realm. They do not see the other realm. They do not know. Thus they do not really live. When they die, they truly die and lose everything. And when such as I, and you, send them on before their time, before they ever open their eyes, we cut them off. . from everything. And that's the hell of it. The bloody, bloody hell of this cursed world we've made for ourselves.'

He drew in a long breath as he looked at me. Then he said, 'And that is why we must find the Maitreya. Keeping Morjin from using the Lightstone is one thing. But it is another to keep the world from losing its soul.'

Without another word, he whirled about and left me there at the edge of the wheatfield. Would we ever find the Maitreya, I wondered? Tomorrow we would continue our journey into this stifling realm of our enemies that I had hated nearly upon first sight. Somewhere on the road ahead of us, I sensed, we would find torment, blood and death, for that was the world. But the world must be more than that, too, or so I told myself. And with that small comfort, I turned back toward our campfire to listen to Alphanderry sing and to eat some of the honey tarts that Liljana had made for us.

Chapter 33

In the morning we continued down the road, the Senta Road as the Hesperuks called it, and according to the Sentans. the Iskull Road, for it led almost straight south through the whole length of Hesperu, paralleling the Rhul River and passing through the great city of Khevaju on its way to Iskull, where the Rhul emptied into the Southern Ocean. The country flattened out even more, with the low hills shrinking down into a steaming green plain. The first good-sized town we came to was named Nubur, and there we asked after Jhamrul. No one seemed to have heard of it. In the town square, built around a widened portion of the Senta Road, we went from shop to shop querying blacksmiths, barbers and the like, and attracting too much attention. A wheelwright wondered a little too loudly why pilgrims would seek a place called Jhamrul instead of Iskull, where pilgrims for ages had embarked from or landed in Hesperu. Finally, to a cooper named Goro, we admitted that we sought a place called the Well of Restoration.

'The Well of Restoration, you say!' Goro barked out as he eyed us. We had dismounted, and stood outside his shop near the huge barrel that signified his trade. 'Tell me about this Well of Restoration!'

Goro was a big man, with a big voice that carried out into the square, where many Hesperuks went about their business or took a little rest beneath one of the spreading almond trees. In shape, with his huge chest and deep belly, he resembled one of the barrels that he made out of wooden staves and hoops of iron. His black curly hair had been trimmed close to his roundish head, as had his beard. His dark eyes seemed a little too small for his face, which had fallen suddenly suspicious. I explained that we were returning from Senta, where we had learned of a fount of healing that might make Atara whole.

'Too many have been blinded these days,' Goro said as he looked at Atara. For a moment, I felt a tenderness trying to fight its way up from inside him. But then his heart hardened, and so did his face as he said. 'But then, many have made errors and suffered their correction.'

'I don't know what you mean by error,' Atara said, 'or its correction. I was blinded in battle, where an evil man took my eyes.'

'That, in itself, is an error,' Goro told her. He looked from me to Master Juwain, and then at Liljana and the children. 'Not to know error is counted by some as an Error Major, and if the igno-rance is willful or defiant, even as an Error Mortal. You should have been told this when you got off your ship in Iskull.'

'We did not come to Senta by way of Iskull,' Liljana told him, 'and so we are new to Hesperu.'

Our encounter had attracted the interest of a bookseller, who had come out of the adjacent shop. He was a small, neat man wearing an impeccably clean tunic of white cotton trimmed at the cuffs and hem with blue silk. His black ringlets of hair gleamed with a fragrant-smelling oil, and he wore gold rings around four of his ten fingers. He presented himself as Vasul, and he said to Goro: 'What is this talk about Errors Major and Errors Mortal?'

A dozen yards out in the square, whose shiny cobblestones seemed to have been scrubbed of the stain of horse dung and swept clean of the tiniest particle of dirt, a few of the other townsfolk passing along had turned their curious faces toward us. I decided that this would be an excellent time to make our farewell and be on our way.

But just as I took a step toward my horse, Goro called out to me: 'Just a moment, pilgrim! We were discussing errors, and yours at that.'

In looking at the stubbornness of censure that befell Goro's face, I had a keen sense that things would go worse for us if we fled instead of remaining. And so I, and my friends, waited to hear what Goro would say.

'Let us,' Goro told, 'read the relevant passages in the Black Book. Will you oblige me, pilgrim?'

He stared straight at me, and it took me some moments before I realized that he was referring to that compendium of evil and lies called the Darakul Elu. Morjin had written it himself in