Black Jade

'What are you doing?' she shrilled at him. 'Are we thieves that we rob the dead?'

Daj finished pulling a necklace off an old woman, and said to Liljana, 'But they won't need it where they're going! And we might need it to buy water or food, in case our coins run out!'

Liljana's round face flushed a hot red. I saw that she was ready to shame him for such an ignoble act, but I felt her check her natural inclinations. As she looked at me knowingly, her eyes softened with forgiveness. I could almost hear her thinking that Daj had learned to do almost anything to survive in the black pits of Argattha, and he would apply those lessons in the desert, and everywhere else we went. This little rat-boy would be the last of us to give up and die.

Liljana bent down and kissed Daj's head. Then she began to explain why we must not take the jewelry. At that moment, though, Kane let out a great shout. He pointed to the mound of rocks to the south of us as he cried out, 'Val! Maram! Arm yourselves! We are attacked!'

I looked toward the rocks expecting to see the droghul — and perhaps a company of the Dragon Guard — charging at us. But two horseman only came flying from around the edge of a great red standing stone. Both wore long, dust-stained robes. The one in the lead howled out a curse or a challenge, or perhaps both. His bearded face was as sharp as a flint and hard with hate; he pointed his saber at Master Juwain. The man behind him, I saw, could hardly be counted a man, for his smooth face showed a boy only a couple years older than Daj. He, too, bore a saber, which he held back behind his head as he whipped his horse straight toward Kane.

I was slow to move, not because of hunger or thirst or weakness of limb, but only because I had seen enough of death for that day — and for the rest of my life. I dreaded what now must befall. It seemed, though, that I had no choice: when death came screaming out of the desert like a whirlwind, who could think to stop it?

And so, with the sun beating down at me like a war hammer and the first horseman pounding closer, I went forward to do battle yet again.

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Chapter 20

I waited on broken ground as my adversary pounded nearer. His face — dark and fine-boned — contorted with wrath. He must have thought that he would easily cut me down and make vultures' meat of me. But my father had drilled me, and all my brothers, in standing with sword at ready to meet the charge of armored knights. This man, though, was no Valari knight. His sword was shorter than mine, and only thin cloth covered his limbs. He fairly oozed overconfidence and a rage to kill. From the cast of his body and the angle of his saber, I saw his error in strategy; I sensed how he anticipated that at the last moment I would cringe in fear of being trampled, allowing him to slash his sword into me. I knew that I could fend off this cut and strike a death blow of my own. And then, as he whipped his horse forward and his dark, anguished eyes met mine, I knew that I could not. 'Well-poisoner!' he screamed at me. 'Well-poisoner!' My father had also taught me a strategy, little used because it was dangerous. I used it now. I stood fast, as if frozen with fear, as my adversary's horse practically drove its hooves into me and snorted into my face. At the last moment, rather than trying to avoid the sword slash by pulling backward, and to my left, I leaped to my right, past the front of the horse and toward its other side. As the sweating beast pushed by me, I reached up with my hand to grasp my startled adversary's arm, held almost straight out to counterbalance the sword gripped in his other hand. I jerked on his arm, hard, and pulled him flying off his horse. He hit the ground with a loud crunch that I feared broke his back. He lay stunned, coughing blood and gasping for breath. I stood with my boot stamped down on his sword arm as I brought the point of Alkaladur within an inch of his throat. 'What are you waiting for?' he managed to cry out. His eyes were dark pools of hate. 'Kill me! Better to die by the sword than by poison!'

I pressed down with my boot against his wrist until his fingers relaxed their grip upon his saber. I looked down at him and said, 'We are not poisoners!'

But the man wasn't listening to me. He spat out a mouthful of blood as he called out, 'Turi, my son! Kill the white-hair if you can, or die on his blade! Don't let the poisoners capture you!'

Just then Maram finally came up to help me. The man I had unhorsed tried to drive his neck up into my blade even as Maram kicked him back to the ground and then fell on top of him, pinning him against the rocks. I turned to see his son whip his horse toward Kane, standing thirty yards away. It seemed that he had already made one pass at Kane and was about to make another.

'Don't kill him!' I shouted at Kane.

I was nearly certain that he would kill him, even if his opponent was only a boy, for I had never seen Kane suffer an enemy a chance to wound him or cut him down. But Kane surprised me. This time, the boy did not charge past him, but reined in his horse as he swept his sword at Kane's head. With a ringing of steel, Kane easily parried this stroke, and then another, and yet another. He stood in the hot sun fending off the boy's saber with his sword as iF giving him a fencing lesson.

'Call off the boy!' I said to the man beneath Maram. Struggle though he might, he could hardly move, for Maram must have outweighed him by ten stone. 'Call him off before he gets hurt! We are not well-poisoners, but we know the one who is!'

Seeing that our attackers were only two, the others came over to help Maram and me. Atara stood holding Estrella's hand. My fallen adversary looked at her and marveled: 'You bring the blind with you! And children, too!'

His hate softened to suspicion and then puzzlement. From beneath Maram, he gasped out, 'Who are you then, and who is the well-poisoner?'

'We'll tell you. happily,' I said to him. 'But first call off your son.'

Me turned his head to shout out: 'Turi, enough! But keep ready to fight again!'

Turi, I thought, had already had more than enough combat for one day. He seemed so tired that he could hardly raise his sword against the tireless Kane.

I said to Maram, 'you're crushing this man — let him up!'

I still worried that the fall had broken something inside my adversary, but this tough desert man had little trouble sitting up. He sucked at his bitten tongue and spat out a mouthful of blood before saying to me: 'My name is Yago of the Soah clan of the Masud. My son is Turi. And who are you?'

While Kane stood eyeing Turi, and Turi him, the rest of my companions gathered around Yago. I presented myself as Mirustral and Kane as a knight called Rowan, and everyone else according to the names that we had chosen to use on our journey, I told Yago that we were pilgrims who sought the Well of Restoration.

'Pilgrims, you say?' He looked at me as his black eyebrows pulled together in doubt. He pointed his sharp chin toward the jewelry that Daj had collected and said, 'Pilgrims pay gold to pass through our lands, they do not collect it. In truth, they no longer pass this way at all.'

'We were afraid,' I said, looking at the bangles and bracelets mounded on the sheepskin, 'that the hyenas would take your kinsmen into the desert and their possessions with them. We collected their things that such a treasure might not be lost.'

I told myself that this was true in spirit; at least I hoped that Daj would want it to be true.

'Treasure it is,' Yago said, regarding the pile of jewelry. 'Where did you think to take it?'

'Nowhere,' I said. 'We've burdens enough to bear, and little water to keep us and our horses bearing them.'

Liljana showed him our waterskins, which were nearly empty, and reiterated that we sought the Well of Restoration, not jewels and gold.

Yago pulled at his beard as he regarded the bodies around us. He said to me, 'Well-poisoners you cannot be, to leave yourselves so little water. But if pilgrims you really are, you've found instead the Well of Death.'

We told him a little of our journey then, and he told me of his. It seemed that the lone mountain to the south of us was sacred to the desert tribes, who called it Raman, the Pillar of the Sky. Yago and his son had made a pilgrimage to it in order to seek visions.

'My son and I,' he told us, 'journeyed from the hadrahs in the southeast to stand beneath the great mountain. And then we rode on here to find the Ayo poisoned.'