Black Jade

It's said that soon he'll ban them throughout his realm.'

I thought that Maram might try to steal off and drink in secret. But it seemed that he had other plans.

'Ah, Mother Magda,' he said to Liljana. 'O great keeper of our company's coins, I don't suppose you have a few silver pieces to spare?'

Liljana shot him a quizzical look and asked, 'What for?'

'I thought I would make the acquaintance of the ladies in that tent.'

He smiled as he pointed at the nearby tent of some courtesans.

Liljana stared at him with such scorn that any other man would have reddened with shame.

But Maram, being Maram, only threw up his hands and said, 'Well, I had to try, didn't I? As I think I shall try my charm, since I haven't anything better. It has sufficed before.'

He took a step toward the courtesans' tent, and I held out my arm to stop him. I said, 'Don't you remember what happened with Jezi Yaga?'

'Do I remember? I do, I do, my friend, and it is precisely that memory that moves me. I've learned too well, ah, just how fragile I really am. And so, since I've likely only a few hours left on earth, I don't want to spend all of them waiting for this king to arrive while I stare at his ugly soldiers.'

He broke away from me and strode off toward the tent. One of Lord Rodas's hirelings moved to intercept him. But when he discovered that Maram did not intend to flee, he let him go. The young tough in his ill-fitting livery might have no sympathy for love of freedom, but he certainly understood well enough raw lust.

A short while later there came a commotion from the western part of the encampment, and someone cried out, 'The King! The King is coming!'

I looked towards the lines of soldiers in front of the tents there. The lines were broken, I saw, for no one stood or knelt to block the very wide center lane leading into the square. Down this lane rode a company of fifty of King Arsu's knights in burnished bronze armor, bearing blue plumes upon their helms and blue capes upon their shoulders. Their shields and surcoats showed quarter-sized red dragons. Then came the smaller escort of King Angand, whose knights bore their own individual arms: black boar's heads, golden eagles, red lions rampant, and the like. Their armor, being partly of steel plate, shone brilliantly. King Angand rode at their center. Although he seemed a smallish man, his renown was vast; in all the realms of the south, no other king had done such great deeds in war or possessed so fine an army. His strange emblem — the white, winged heart — gleamed from the banner that one of his knights bore and from the silken surcoat covering his own chest. His great ease with his mount hinted at a lifetime of long, hard marches and battle.

The same could not be said of King Arsu. To begin with, he rode no horse. Indeed, he did not ride at all, if that meant guiding the beast that bore him. Rather, he sat within a sort of canopied and gilded fort perched on the back of an elephant. Until that moment, I had wondered if the drawings that I had seen in books might be pure figments. But this huge beast was as real as the earth that shook beneath its treelike, driving legs. Its swaying nose, seven feet long, hung down from a fearsome face festooned with two great curving tusks that could have impaled a man and left him hanging high in the air. It was said that the Hesperuks captured elephants in the wild, in the south, and then armored them and trained them for battle. If true, then I hoped never to meet such a raging mountain of flesh at work. Strangely, its handler — a small man sitting on the elephant's neck in front of the King — controlled it with the well-timed tappings of a little stick.

King Arsu seemed himself an elephantine man. As the elephant stepped and swayed, the layers of fat beneath King Arsu's bronze armor seemed to flow and swell out one portion or another, and spill out over the neck in a cascade of fleshy chins. Despite the armor, I could see that he was no fighting king. So huge were his arms and labored his motions that he would have difficulty wielding a sword or drawing a bow. No spatter of blood, I thought, had ever marked the bright yellow surcoat that ballooned over him. This silken fabric, of course, showed the three- quarter sized red dragon that Morjin made all his subject kings to bear. Perhaps wisely, though, Morjin had left King Arsu the one glorious trapping of the Hesperuk monarchs: a great, flowing cloak sewn with ten thousand parrot feathers, in brilliant colors of red, yellow, green and blue. King Arsu's golden crown — set with three great emeralds — seemed almost dull in comparison to this fantastic garment. The two kings and their guard entered the square and made their way toward King Arsu's pavilion, where a raised dais, covered in a silken canopy, had been built. Five heavy chairs had been set out upon it. I wondered that his army should burden itself hauling the supplies needed to construct such a box, but it seemed that King Arsu's soldiers never traveled without a good supply of wood. King Arsu came down from his kneeling elephant, and with a great groaning effort, managed to climb the few steps leading up to the box. He wheezed as he stood behind the long table at its front. Then he settled his great bulk down into the centermost and largest of the chairs: an ornate work of teak and gold encrusted with gems. A short, dark woman perhaps thirty, years old came out of the pavilion behind the dais and sat down on the chair to his left. Her name, I learned, was Lida: the King's cousin and consort, who went everywhere that King Arsu went, even to war. An old man wearing the red robe of a priest of the Kallimun claimed the chair to King Arsu's right. I overheard someone call him Arch Uttam: the highest of all Hesperuk's priests and the most terrible. His flesh seemed to cling like a tight glove to his skull. King Angand sat next to him, at one end of the dais, while Lord Mansarian came up and took the chair beside Lida at the other end.

A silence now fell over the square. King Arsu gazed dismissively at the bowls of apples and the pitchers of lemon squash and various nectars set out on the table. Then a slave hurried up to bring him a goblet full of mother's milk sweetened with honey, his preferred drink. He sipped from it, and then looked out to address the hundreds of people assembled there. His voice seemed incongruent with his massive form, for it came out of his throat all high and squeaky, like that of a mouse: 'Soldiers of Hesperu! Citizens of Orun! We are met today to celebrate our victory — as well as Lady Lida's birthday, only two days hence!'

He turned toward Lida, and the two small, piglike eyes embedded in his fleshy face seemed to warm happily. Then he looked back out over the square and announced: 'We are told that we shall have entertainments! Dancers and singers — and the finest traveling troupe in all the north! So sit and enjoy yourselves! The most valorous of soldiers that a king was ever honored to lead have more than earned this day's revelries!'

His words, I thought, fairly shrieked with bravado and insin-cerity. And yet his many soldiers looked upon him with a real reverence lighting up their faces. Their king had once again led them to victory. He had bestowed upon them honors, loot and captured women. More than this, however, he had given them great purpose. From the sheer heat of enthusiasm that passed from soldier to soldier like a flame, I knew that they believed utterly in the crusade on which King Arsu led them. Surely, in the war that must soon come, they would die fighting with great fervor for King Arsu — and for their King of Kings whom they called Morjin.

'Has everyone eaten?' King Arsu called out. 'Good! Good! Then Arch Uttam will lead us in a recitation, and then our sport will begin!' As Arch Uttam stood up from his chair, so did everyone else assembled around the muddy grass — even King Arsu. A dozen Red Priests dressed in flowing scarlet robes now entered the square and positioned themselves among the soldiers at intervals of forty paces. They looked toward Arch Uttam to begin reciting from the Darakul Elu. This he did, without having even to open the black book that he clutched in his veiny, cadaverous hands. In a grinding, unpleasant voice he intoned a long passage that he had committed to memory, as he had many others of this dreadful book:

'Warriors who carry within their hearts the ineffable flame of the One, who bear inside their souls the seeds of angels — go forth to victory against those who have turned away from the Light! Face death with courage, and you yourselves will never truly die! Master your fear! Make sacrifice of your blood that others may know greater life! Be strong and take dominion over the weak. .'

Arch Uttam spoke on and on in a like way for what seemed forever. I noticed that many of the soldiers in their ranks raised up their eyes toward him as they moved their lips in echo of the words that he recited.

At last, he finished. Then he beckoned toward two of his priests standing off in front of Arch Uttam's pavilion. They held between them a young woman perhaps of an age with Atara. She wore a tunic of lamb's wool as white as snow. They had to help her walk out into the square in front of the box, for her glazed eyes suggested that they had given her some sort of potion that robbed her of her will. Her head kept nodding forward toward her chest. Arch Uttam came down from the dais then. A third priest stepped forward to give him a bowl fashioned from a human skull while a fourth priest handed him a knife.

'No,' I whispered, 'it cannot be!'

It nearly killed me that I could not move or cry out in protest, but only stand there raging silently. I wanted to gouge out my own eyes. Then one of the priests clamped his fist in the woman's hair, and pulled back her head, exposing her throat. With a quick, practiced motion. Arch Uttam sliced his knife across it, even as he positioned the