Black Jade

We came out into a bowl of thick grass surrounded by hills, to its center stood an old cottage, or rather, its ruins. It had no roof and only three good walls: the fourth wall, facing us, had crumbled in places, and its doorway lacked a door. I pointed Altaru straight toward this hole in the wall's mortared stone. And Maram cried out in protest to me: 'What are you doing? The pass lies that way!' He pointed off past the right of the house. 'We won't make it — not this way!' I called back to him. 'We must make a stand, here.'

He didn't argue with me, nor did anyone else. I drew up in front of the cottage and waited as my friends joined me and dismounted. Kane and Maram helped Bemossed down from Altaru's back; then I rode him through the doorway into the cottage. Kane took charge of getting the other horses and everyone inside. I dismounted, too, and began walking around the cottage's single room. Piles of old leaves and bits of stone littered its packed-earth floor. Three of its walls, as I had thought, seemed to be in good enough repair. They stood a good seven feet high. The southern wall, however, had crumbled down to a height of four feet along much of its length. It was no castle that I had chosen for us to defend, but the best protection we could hope to find.

While Master Juwain and Liljana worked to set Bemossed's arm and wrap it, Kane unholstered his bow and began sticking arrows down into the dirt floor. So did I, and so did Maram. He moved with speed but without conviction or hope. I heard him mutter to himself, 'Ah, Maram, my old friend, this is madness — this is surely the end.'

'How many times have you said that?' I asked him, pushing an arrow down into the rain-softened earth.

'I don't know,' he grumbled. 'But sooner or later, I'll be right.'

I looked out over the crumbled section of wall for the approach of our enemy. I said, 'We survived the siege of Khaisham, didn't we?'

'By a miracle, we did. But here we have no escape tunnel.' 'Then we'll have to find a different way to escape.' Behind us, near the cottage's north wall, Estrella tried to quiet the horses. She and Daj had tethered them to an old beam that lay on the floor there; other than it and some splinters from an old window frame, the cottage seemed to have been stripped of wood and all its furnishings.

'This is not so bad a place,' I told Maram. 'Not nearly so bad as Argattha, where we fought off a hundred men.'

'But there we had Ymiru with us, and we wore armor, too. And Atara had her other sight.'

He turned toward Atara, who was busy stringing her great horn bow. She kept her arrows in the quiver slung on her back. I felt her waiting desperately for her second sight to return.

'We will win,' I told Maram.

'Against two hundred knights?'

'Yes,' I said.

'How, Val?'

I looked out over the low section of the wall toward the gap in the hills to the south. And I told him, 'I don't know, but we will win.'

My words did not convince him. I wasn't sure that I could even convince myself. I saw Kane's jaws working with all the tension of a steel trap, and I sensed that even my grim-faced friend had rarely found himself in such a desperate situation.

There came a grinding snap as Master Juwain set the bones of Bemossed's arm. Bemossed gave a gasp, and his face contorted with pain. He said nothing. I saw little hope in his eyes, and I wondered if he regretted coming away with us. I felt a tightness in his throat; a sense of doom seemed to grip him in an ironclad fist. I couldn't help thinking of what Master Matai had said about the Maitreya: that his star would burn brightly but not long.

A few moments later, Lord Mansarian rode his white stallion through the gap in the hills to the south. The green peacock feathers of his shiny bronze helm fluttered in the breeze. Four or five of his companies of Red Capes thundered behind him. Lord Mansarian led them to a point in the grassy bowl about four hundred yards away: just outside the range of our arrows. He drew up his men in long lines facing the cottage. I caught a flash of a white- haired man wearing a red robe, and I knew that this must be one of the Red Priests. Another priest — Salmelu, I guessed — sat on his horse next to a man covered from head to knee with a gray traveling cloak. I could not see if he wore armor beneath it. I could not see his face, but the acid burning my throat told me that this must be Morjin.

'Damn him!' Kane muttered. He stood next to me behind the crumbled section of wall. 'Damn his blood!'

Daj came up to us, and craned his head over the wall to look upon our enemy. He gripped his little sword in his hand, and he said, 'Why do they wait there? Why don't they surround the house?'

'Because,' I told him, 'it is easier to ride down fleeing rats than to face them cornered with no place to run.'

He immediately understood and said, 'They want us to flee. Well, this rat will kill at least one of them as they come over the walls.'

So saying, he pointed his sword at the Red Capes. I remembered how in Argattha he had used a spear to dispatch several of Morjin's wounded soldiers.

Lord Mansarian posted two men on the gentle slopes above the western and eastern sides of the cottage — no doubt to give warning in case we should flee.

Seeing this, Maram said, 'Why don't they just storm us and be done? What are they waiting for?'

They are waiting for our nerve to break, I thought. But I said nothing.

Maram twanged the string of his bow, and said, 'How many do you think that we can hit before they reach the house? Five? Ten?'

'Ten? Hmmph,' Atara said. 'You won't be able to shoot with any accuracy until they come within a hundred yards. And then you'll only have seconds to get off your rounds.'

'And that is my point. Even if by some miracle, we each get five of them, or even ten, that's only thirty men, which will leave — '

'Be quiet!' Kane snapped at him. 'This is no time for arithmetic.'

'Is it not?' Maram turned to look at Master Juwain wrapping Bemossed's arm in the corner as Liljana paid out a length of linen from a large roll.

'Nine of us minus nine leaves zero, which is all that will remain of the great Lightstone Traveling Troupe as soon as the damn Red Capes find their courage and charge us.'

He threw down his bow in disgust and moved over to the horses. It did not take him long to find his brandy bottle and to begin drinking straight from its glassy mouth.

'What are you doing?' Kane shouted at him. 'Get back to your post!'

'Give me a moment, damn you! I just want one more taste of brandy before I die.'

Kane stepped toward him as if intending to seize him by the neck and drag him back to the wall. But I stayed him, and said, 'Let him be.'

'But he'll drink himself senseless!'

'No, he won't,' I said. I didn't add: Who could blame him if he did?

I gazed out across the field at the two hundred Red Capes sitting on their mounts and pointing their spears at us. At the center of their front line, Lord Mansarian seemed to be consulting with the two priests and the gray- cloaked man I took as Morjin.

'Maram is right,' Kane said to me. 'We won't kill very many before they reach this wall.'

'Maybe we'll kill enough to drive them off,' I said.

'No — we won't. They'll come over the wall, and through the doorway,' Kane said grimly.

I gripped the hilt of my sword and said, 'I will kill anyone that tries to come through it.'

'So, you will — but it still won't be enough. Maram and I can't hold this wall by ourselves.'

'But what about me?' Daj said, pointing his sword toward our enemy. 'I can fight!'

I looked down upon this valiant young warrior, and at Atara, who stood next to him gripping her bow. How wrong it was, I thought, that Lord Mansarian and his war-hardened men should have driven to battle a blind woman and a beardless boy.

'There is a way,' I said to Kane. 'There must be a way.'

But I no longer believed this. I looked over at Bemossed, grimacing as Master Juwain fashioned a sling for his arm, and I silently raged that we had found this bright, gentle man only to have to lose him soon to our enemy's spears.