Black Jade

turning and stop the rising of the sun. I had a strange sense that he knew exactly what I was about, and wanted to trust me, as I did him.

'Yes, Master Musician?' he said to me.

I held my flute up to the sun's onstreaming rays. I said, 'I can play a few melodies, but I'm hardly a master.'

'All free men are masters to such as I.'

'I'm hardly free,' I told him. The memory of my family's slaughter, I knew, bound me in a dark prison as surely as any chain. 'Who is free any more? It is said that a Lord Olum is now master of all traveling troupes, and others as well.'

Bemossed looked at a hawk soaring high on the wind above us. He said, 'The birds are free. People's hearts are free.'

This, I thought, was a dangerous half-quote from the Darakul Elu: there, it was written that people's hearts were free when they beat in time to the heart of the Red Dragon.

'A man should always follow his own heart,' I said to him.

'I heard you following yours last night. In your music. The way you played. I heard such a longing for freedom,'

Bemossed dared a great deal in what he said to me and the way that he said it. He didn't appear to mind. There was steel inside him, and more, something as brilliant and adamantine as diamond. It was as if he had long since willed himself to act with little concern for what might befall himself. His courage shone out like that of my brothers.

'You must know what it is like to long for freedom,' I told him. 'They say you ran away from your master when you were younger.'

'Chedu,' he said, rubbing at the scars on the back of his neck. A darkness fell over his face like a dust-cloud covering the sun, 'He made me do … evil things.'

'But you do not complain that he did evil things to you?'

He shrugged his shoulders again. His gaze took in the white flowers nearby, Mangus's house and the village below us, and the hills and sky beyond that. Something inside him flowed all golden like melting honey. Life, I thought, had treated him cruelly, and yet he seemed to have great affection for every part of the world that he beheld or contemplated — almost every part.

'Chedu,' he said again, 'wanted me to flay a piglet alive. So that he could sell a living skin to rejuvenate the flesh of a great lord, he told me. But I knew he really wanted to grieve me by making me torture a helpless animal, and so I couldn't. After that, I kept thinking about flaying Chedu. So I ran away.'

'And when he recaptured you, it's said, you refused to obey him.'

'I would rather have died.'

'And so he whipped you — nearly to death?'

Bemossed smiled sadly as he said, 'With a Dragon's Scourge. Have you seen one at work? The Crucifiers tie bits of steel to thongs, and call them the Dragon's Teeth. Chedu wanted to use it to strip the skin off me.'

'What stopped him, then?'

The Crucifiers did. A priest, Ra Amru, came along in time to save me.' Now Bemossed's smile grew bright with irony. 'You see, he reminded Chedu that I was Hajarim.'

The blood of the Hajarim, I remembered, was thought to be so unclean that even the priests of the Kallimun were forbidden to spill it. And so Hajarim were usually burnt, or racked in correction for their errors, or if condemned to death, strangled. The black cross signified that, like animals, the Hajarim weren't even worthy of being crucified. I said to Bemossed, 'You had other masters before Chedu, yes?' He nodded his head. 'Chedu was the worst of them, but not

the first.'

'And who would that be?'

'Lord Kullian. My father served him, and I was born on his estate.'

The story that Bemossed now told me made me grit my teeth against all the madness and hurts of the world. It seemed that for the first years of his childhood, Bemossed had lived quietly with both his father and mother, in the expectation that he would learn his father's trade of butchering. But then, in one of the wars of the north, Lord Kullian had joined a rebellion against the young King Arsu. King Arsu's soldiers finally came to kill Lord Kullian and confiscate his lands. Bemossed's father died trying to protect Lord Kullian. and Bemossed's mother suffered a broken mouth trying to protect Bemossed. The blood from this wound had defiled the cut fist of one of the soldiers, and his captain immediately ordered Bemossed's mother to be buried alive. Bemossed himself they made to help dig the grave. After that, he was sold as a gong farmer cleaning out the latrines of local notables. And then resold to a succession of masters, ending with Chedu and Mangus.

I did not know what to say upon hearing of these terrible things. And so I forced out, 'That is war.'

Bemossed shrugged his shoulders. 'Others have suffered much worse than I.'

I thought of King Arsu's present campaign, and the thousand men he had mounted on crosses. I looked at Bemossed. 'You say you were born near Avrian?'

'I think so. I think I was three or four when they killed my parents.'

'And how old are you now?'

'Twenty-two, I think. Perhaps twenty-three.'

'You don't know? Didn't anyone ever tell you the date of your birth?'

'No — why should they have?'

The sun falling on his face seemed to bring out much of his essence, and I saw him as many things at once: sad, compassionate, strong, innocent and wise. I thought he lived too close to the dark, turbid currents of the unknown self that flowed inside of everyone. And yet I felt a wild joy of life surging there, too. And so I said to him, 'Most people celebrate the day they were born.'

'Most free people, perhaps,'

I watched as he rose up off his rock and went over to scratch beneath the jaw of one of the goats. I could not imagine him ever using a sharp knife to slit this gentle animal's throat, and I said to him, 'Do you ever think about being free?'

He looked up at the hawk still circling on the morning's rising wind, I felt him building inside himself a wall of stone to keen his storming passions within — even as I tried to keep those of others without. Then he said a strange thing: 'Does a bird think of flying beyond the sky?'

I caught his gaze and said, 'You hate your service with Mangus don't you?'

'But why would you think that?'

'Because I know about hate,' I told him.

A gentleness came into him as he looked at me. 'I think you do. Master Arajun. And I think you speak about things that it is best not to speak about.'

'Then let us not speak but act,' I said to him. 'Tomorrow, after Mangus changes Garath's dressing, we shall leave Jhamrul. We have need of a healer — why don't you come with us?' His eyes grew restless and bright. He called out softly, 'A healer, you say? But I am Hajarim!'

'Truly, you are. But you must know what the people of your village say about you.' 'They do not understand.'

'With some power you were born with,' I said to him, 'with some virtue that runs like fire along your blood, you lay your hands on others, and they are healed.'

He lifted his hand away from the goat's throat and looked at it. 'You … do not understand. I can do nothing to heal anyone. I'm only a slave.'

I wanted to tell him that he might heal the whole world, But old doubts tore into me, and terrible memories, too, and because I wasn't wholly open with him, he couldn't quite bring himself to trust me.

'Bemossed,' I said again, rising up off the grass. Then I crossed over to him and took hold of his hand. At the touching of my palm to his, he gasped, in astonishment. His eyes went wide with horror, exaltation, delight and dread. I stared at him deeply as he did me; it was like staring at the sun. 'You. do not know what you do,' he told me. He seemed to be searching for something in me as his hand gripped mine.

I felt in him a vast, cold loneliness and a wild hope, too 'What do you do?'