Black Jade

'Don't worry about Kane,' I told him, looking down at Kane's still form. 'Does the sun rise in the morning? Does the forest fail to turn green in the spring?'

There seemed little to do then except wait. We all sat beneath our paltry covering, shifting about as the sun rose higher and the shadow cast by the cloth shifted as well. By noon, it had grown very hot. We sweated, and we drank from our waterskins to replenish ourselves. Flies came to feed on our sweat and bite us. Our horses stood chewing up what forage they could find. Out in the desert, lizards scrambled over sun-baked rocks. The burning air sucked the moisture from my eyes.

We sweated and suffered through the afternoon. While the others dozed, Estrella and I kept watch over Kane, who did not stir. I kept a watch on the wavering desert, looking as always for sign of our enemies.

I think I had never looked forward so much to the coming of the night. After endless hours, the sun melted like a gout of burning red steel into the horizon in the west. The desert grew beautiful then. The day's last light touched the mountains behind us with a starkness that unveiled their deeper life. The air cleared, and the sky fell a deep and glowing blue. After a while, the stars came out in their glittering millions. It grew so cool that I drew on my cloak. Liljana, now awake and tending to Kane, covered him with his cloak and helped Master Juwain pour some tea down his throat. He slept, on and on, as the stars brightened and the hyenas gave voice to their eerie cries far out in the desolate land around us. It was just before dawn, with the rocks of the desert nearly as cold as ice, when Kane finally opened his eyes. He looked at me through the light of the little fire that Maram had made out of some dead yusage. He smiled as his hand found mine and squeezed my fingers with a pitiful weakness. Then he murmured to me, 'So Val — so.'

Liljana set to making him some broth, which she insisted that he must drink. But Kane would have none of it. 'Meat,' he murmured again. 'I must have meat.'

In our stores, Liljana found a little ham, which was going bad, and some dried venison, which had fared much better. But Kane would have none of these either. He let his leonine head roll to the side so that he could better look at me. And he said, 'Val — bring me fresh meat.'

Maram could aim an arrow straighter than I, most of the time, but he could scarcely move to draw a bowstring and was in no shape to hunt. And Atara, who might have been the finest archer in the world, was still completely blind. And so when the sun came up, I took up my bow and walked out into the desert. I gripped in my hand my brother Karshur's favorite hunting arrow, the one he had given me when I had set out on the great Quest. Around my neck hung my lucky bear claw, torn from the paw of the great beast that had nearly killed Asaru — and myself. It brought me luck that morning, or so I thought. Only three miles from our encampment I came upon a small herd of gazelles with their long, spiral horns and swishing black tails. I put Karshur's arrow through the heart of a young buck. I slung the dead animal across my shoulders and bore him back to our camp. Liljana took charge of the butchering, announcing that she would make a fine roast of its ribs. But Kane wouldn't wait for this feast. He called out to Liljana, saying, 'Bring me my meat, just as it is.'

I had watched lions eat raw meat before, but never Kane. At first, as he nibbled at the gobbets that Liljana cut for him, he was so weak that he could hardly chew. He seemed, however, to gain strength with every bite. Soon, he was tearing into red flesh with his long, white teeth, swallowing in huge gulps and calling for more meat. Sounds of deep delight rumbled in his throat; blood smeared his hands and mouth. His black eyes began filling with some of their oldfire. And still he worked at the gazelle's meat, downing an entire leg and the liver and then calling for more.

I could scarcely believe that a man could eat so much, but then reminded myself that Kane was scarcely a man. After he had filled his belly, he lay back to digest this feast. Then he stirred a few hours later to begin eating again. So it went through the course of that long, hot day. By the afternoon, he was able to stand on the stony earth beneath a blazing, white-hot sun; in the early evening, he began pacing about our encampment as he cast his bright eyes toward the south, east, north and west. He drew his long sword and began his nightly practice, stabbing straight out into the hearts of imagined enemies, slashing and slicing the gleaming steel with a renewed ferocity that tore apart the air. And still the deep, red fire of life blazed hotter and brighter inside him. When full night fell upon the earth and the lions roared out in the distance, Kane turned his savage face toward the wind and roared back at them. He thrust the point of his sword straight up toward the stars, and raised back his head in a long, triumphant howl to the heavens that it was good to be alive.

After that, he rejoined us for some tea. As his hand closed around his cup, his powerful body rippled with a restlessness that drove him to pace about, circling the fire again and again as the earth does the sun.

'So,' he growled out, 'I must thank all of you for tending to me. I can tell you little of what happened — the truth that can be told is not the deepest truth, eh? And I had fallen so deep. So, the Black Jade in the Skadarak nearly sucked out our souls. My black gelstei nearly sucked out my life. Morjin made it so. It nearly turned me into ice. He came for me then. He sucked out my blood, and when that wasn't enough, the very liquids of my throat and eyes. There was a blackness — only a cold blackness, and nothing more.'

He drew out his black gelstei and stared at it a moment before shaking his head and putting it away again.

'How is it then,' Master Juwain asked him, 'that you are still alive?'

'Ha! — the next time I use my stone, I might not be, eh?' Kane's lips pulled back in a terrible smile. 'From what you've said, it seems that Maram forced Morjin to turn his attention away from my little bauble. Then too. .'

His voice died into a deep rumble as he looked at me. 'Then, too,' he went on, 'there is always the fire, eh? The light. It is hard to put it out. Especially with the lights of my friends shining through me like seven suns.'

He turned his bright smile from me as he met eyes with each of us. He looked at Estrella for a long time. And then he said, 'Enough of that. We've other things to speak of. Liljana — how much food do we have left? How much water?'

With much relief, we turned our talk from Morjin and his dark ening of our gelstei to the more practical concerns of our quest. Our plan to cross the desert posed considerable problems of logistics. Our horses and remounts would be able to find only so much forage in such a sere land, and if they were to bear us on their backs, the pack horses must bear on their backs much grain to feed them. But they could not carry all the water that we. and our mounts, would need to reach the streams and rivers of the Crescent Mountains. Therefore everything depended upon us finding the water holes that had quenched Kane's thirst so long ago.

'There should be a well fifty miles from here,' Kane said, pointing out into the dark land to the west. 'We'll find a low line of red hills, two miles in length, and the well just to the north of them.'

'But will we be able to draw water from it?' Master Juwain asked.

'If it hasn't gone dry,' Kane said. 'And if its owners allow it.'

Once, he said, the clans of the Taiji tribe had held sway throughout the southeastern lands of the Red Desert. Kane had bought water, and other necessities of life, from them. But all the Ravirii tribes hated outsiders, even pilgrims, and sometimes refused to trade water for gold. If times were hard and the hot winds of war maddened them, they would even put wayfarers to the sword, taking their lives and their gold.

At the look of concern on Maram's face as he told us this, Kane clapped him on the arm and said, 'Don't worry — the Ravirii are great warriors, it's true, but therefore they respect nothing so much as even greater warriors. And who are greater than the Valari, eh? If it comes to swords, once they see our kalamas at work, they'll leave us well alone.'

Two hours before dawn, in the coolest part of the night, we set out to the west. It soon became clear that Maram was to have a horrible time of it, for he could hardly ride. Because it tormented him to sit in his hard leather saddle, he took to standing in his horse's stirrups. But the constant, rocking abrasion against his torn thighs proved almost as bad. When he could bear the pain no longer, he dismounted and walked beside his horse. Among the few parts of his body that Jezi Yaga hadn't bitten, as he told us. were the soles of his feet.

After a while, the sun came up over the mountains in the east and touched the desert with a golden-red glow. This wasteland, as I saw, turned out to be full of life — but spread out sparsely across huge distances. That morning I saw snakes slithering through the knife grass, and horny toads, and sandrunners hopping along as they looked for insects to scoop up in their yellow bills. Other birds winged through the air: rock sparrows and gambels and hawks. We came across a lone, black-maned lion feeding on the carcass of an antelope. Fifty yards away, a