Black Jade

'Yes, I am.'

'But such ascents were made for eagles or rock goats, not bulls such as I.'

'Bulls, hmmph,' Atara said from on top of her horse. 'You eat enough for an elephant.'

Maram ignored this jibe and said to me, 'You are the man of the mountains.'

'Yes,' I said, 'and so I'll go with you. And then you can recite for me the next verse.'

Maram sighed at this as he grudgingly nodded his head. We decided then that Maram, Master Juwain and I would climb the hill while Liljana and the others worked on preparing lunch for our return.

Our hike up the hill proved to be neither as long or arduous as Maram feared. Even so, he puffed and panted his way up a deer trail and then cursed as he nearly turned an ankle on some loose rocks in a mound of scree. To hear him grunting and groaning, one might have thought he was about to die from the effort. But I was sure he suffered so loudly mainly to impress me. And to remind both him and me of the great sacrifices that he was willing to make on my behalf.

At last, we gained the crest, where the wind blew quickly and cooled our sweat-soaked garments. We stood resting against the sandstone ridge that topped it. We looked out to the northwest where a great massif of snow- covered peaks rose up along the horizon like an impenetrable white fortress. But between there and here lay a country of rugged hills and lakes that pooled beneath them. All of them were blue. Which one might be the lake told of in the Rhyme, I could not say.

'A tri-kul lake,' Maram intoned, looking out below us. 'Very well, but what is that? A 'kul' is a pass or a gorge, and I can't say that any of these lakes is surrounded by three such, or even one.'

'Are you sure the verse told of a tri-kul lake?' Master Juwain asked him.

'Are you saying I misheard the Rhyme?'

'Indeed you did. The word in question is drakul.'

'But why didn't you correct me before this?'

'Because,' Master Juwain said, 'I wanted to give you a chance to puzzle through the Rhymes yourself. Our goal will never be won through memory alone.'

'But what is a drakul then? I've never heard of such a thing.'

'Are you sure? Think back to your lessons in ancient Ardik.'

'Do you mean, try to remember lessons in that dry, dry tongue that I tried to forget, even years ago?'

Master Juwain sighed and rubbed his head, now covered with a wool cap. And he said, 'Why don't you give me the next verses, then? How many times have I told you that clues to a puzzle in one verse might be found in those before or after it?'

'Very well,' Maram said. And he dutifully recited:

The Lake's two tongues are rippling rills

That twist and hiss past saw-toothed hills;

A cold tongue licks the setting sun.

But your course cleaves the shining one.

'No, no,' Master Juwain said to him. 'You've misheard the final line here, too. It should be: 'Your course cleaves the shaida one'.'

'Shaida?' Maram called out. His great voice was sucked up by the howling wind. 'But what is that?'

'Think back on your lessons — do you not remember?'

'No.'

Master Juwain dragged his fingernails across the rough sandstone beneath his hand, then turned to me. 'Val, do you remember?'

I thought for a moment and said, 'Shaida is a word from a much older language that was incorporated into ancient Ardik, wasn't it? Didn't it have something to do with dragons?'

Master Juwain smiled as he nodded his head. And then here, at the top of this windy hill, where hawks circled high above us he took a few minutes to repeat a lesson that he must have taught us when we were boys. Two paths, he told us, led to the One. The first path was that of the animals and growing things, and it was a simple one: the primeval harmony of life. The second path, however, was followed only by man — and the dragons. Only these two beings. Master Juwain said, pitted themselves against nature and sought to dominate or master it: man with all his intelligence and yearning for a better world and the dragon with pride and fire. Indeed, because men forged iron ore into steel ploughshares or swords and wielded the coruscating fury of the firestones themselves, our way also was called the Way of the Dragon. It was a hard way, perilous and cruel for it led to war and discord with the world — and seemingly even with the One. But out of such strife. Master Juwain claimed like the great Kundalini working his way up through the chakras, would eventually emerge a higher harmony,

'The Star People surely know a paradise that we can only imagine, the Elijin and Galadin, too,' Master Juwain told us. 'That is, they would if not for Angra Mainyu and those who followed him. Their way, I'm afraid, is still our way, and we call it the Left Hand Path.'

Here he nodded at Maram. 'And now you have all the clues you need to unlock these verses.'

Maram thought for a long few moments, pulling at his beard as he looked out at the blue sky and the even bluer lakes gleaming beneath it. And then he pointed west at the longest of them and said, 'All right, then, surely we are to espy a drakul lake, and of all these waters, only that one looks very much like a dragon — or a snake. And, see, two streams lead down into it, or rather away from it, past those saw-toothed hills. They do look something like tongues, I suppose. And so I would say that we're to follow the southernmost stream, to the left.'

'Very good.' Master Juwain said, nodding his head. 'I concur.'

Our course being set, we hiked back down the hill and sat down to a lunch of fried goose eggs and wheat bread toasted over a little fire. Then we checked the horses' loads and led them around the base of the hill topped by the castle rock. We worked our way through thick woods, and up and down the ravines that grooved the hill's slopes. Finally we came out into the valley of the lakes on the other side. We made camp that evening in clear sight of the dragon lake to the west of us. Its two tongues, of dusk-reddened water, caught; the fire of the setting sun.

It took us most of the next day to reach this lake, for we had to forge on past other hills, lakes and ground grown boggy from all the water that collected here. But reach it we did, and we began our trek through the dense vegetation of its southern shore. We paused for the night in a copse of great birch trees. We smelled the faint reek of a skunk and listened to the honking of the geese and the beating wings of other waterfowl out on the lake. The next day we walked on until we came to the stream told of in the Rhymes. We followed this rushing rill toward its source south, and then curving west and north. The hills around us grew ever higher. In this way, over the next two days, we made a miles-wide circle and came up behind the great massif that we had sighted from the sandstone castle. And then, as the Rhymes also told, we came upon a road that snaked back and forth still higher, winding up through barren tundra toward what seemed a snow-locked pass between two of the massif's mountains.

'Ah, I don't like the look of this,' Maram said as we stood by our horses looking up at the white peaks before us. 'It's too damn high!'

'But we don't have to go over the pass,' Daj said, 'just through it.'

'I don't care — it's still too high. It will be cold up there, cold enough to freeze our breath, I think. And what if there are bears?'

He went on complaining in a like manner for a while before he turned his disgruntlement to the road we must follow up to the heights. It was an ancient road and seemed once to have been a good one, built of finely-cut granite stones taken from the rock around us. Some of these stones, though worn, were still jointed perfectly. But time and ice and snow had riven many of the stones and reduced the road in places to no more than a path of rubble. Below us the road simply vanished into a wall of forest and the dark earth from which it grew. We could detect no sign of where this road might come from. Above us the road led on: through the mountains, we hoped, and straight to the Brotherhood's secret school.

'Well, I suppose we should camp here for the night,' Maram said.

'No, I'm afraid we must go up as high as we can,' Master Juwain told him, pointing at the great saddle