wondered, willfully confounding us? Talking with her was like trying to eat the wind.
'We've come a very long way, Mistress Mithuna, I told her. 'A great deal may depend on our finding the Lightstone. Would you mind if we searched the ruins for it?'
Mithuna's face fell sad; almost as if speaking to herself she said, 'Should I mind the rising of tomorrow's sun? What should be shall be.'
She turned to Atara and said, 'It's growing late – will you sit with us tonight beneath the stars?'
Atara brushed back the hair from her eyes and stood up straight like the warrior she was. She said, 'Are you inviting my friends as well?'
'I'm sorry,' Mithuna said, 'but only scryers may see our refuge.'
'Do you mean, see with the eyes or… see?'
This made Mithuna smile, and she said, 'You see, you really are a scryer.'
She turned as if to make ready to leave, which prompted Maram to hold up his hand and say, 'No, don't go just yet! We've brandy and beer and Ea's finest minstrel to help us appreciate it. Won't you share this with us?'
He held the crystal carelessly so that it stuck straight out from his body. All his attention was turned on Mithuna, and I knew that he wanted to share much more with her than beer.
Mithuna looked at him a long time, then said, 'It was foretold that a man in red would find the firestone that destroyed the Tur-Solonu. I, myself, saw you in one of my visions.'
'You saw me, did you?' Maram said. His smile suggested that he had seen her in his dreams. 'And what did you see?'
'What do you mean? I saw you with the firestone.'
'And is that all?'
'Should there be more?' Mithuna asked as her eyes brightened.
'Oh, yes, indeed there should be,' Maram said as he gripped his crystal more tightly.
'Did you see my heart filling up with the fire of the sun? Did you see this fire pouring out of the gelstei?'
'I saw it melting the hardest rock,' she said with a smile.
'Did you? And did you, ah, see the earth shake, volcanoes erupting?'
'It is said that the firestones of old caused such cataclysms,' Mithuna admitted.
'They were very powerful,'
'Powerful, yes,' Maram said, holding his crystal pointing almost straight up. 'I suspect none of us knows just how powerful.'
'That is a dangerous thing,' Mithuna said, stretching her finger toward the firestone.'We do know that.'
'Yes, but surely one can learn how to use it.' 'Perhaps some can. But can you?'
'Do you doubt me?' Maram said with a hurt look. 'Perhaps I should leave it where I found it?'
'No, surely it is yours to do with as you will.'
'Should I give it to you, then, Mistress Mithuna?'
'And what would I do with a firestone?'
'I wish I could, ah, give you something.'
Mithuna's face suddenly fell serious as if the whole weight of the world were pulling at it. In a sad voice, she said, 'Then give me your promise that you'll learn to use this stone wisely.'
'I do promise you that,' Maram said, glancing at the broken Tur-Solonu. Then his eyes covered her as he smiled. 'More wisely than did the Red Dragon.'
'Don't joke about such things,' she told him. Now she pointed fiercely at the firestone. 'You should know that a doom was laid upon this crystal: that it would bring Morjin's undoing. That is why he left it here.'
We all looked at the firestone more closely. And then Kane asked, 'And who laid this doom?'
'Her name was Rebekah Lorus,' Mithuna said. 'She was mistress of the murdered scryers.'
'Now that would be a strange justice,' Kane said, 'if the very gelstei that Morjin made unmade him.'
'But he didn't make it,' Mithuna said.
'What? Didn't make it, eh? Then who did?'
'A man named Kaspar Saranom. He was one of Morjin's priests.'
'And how do you know this?'
'Kaspar destroyed the Tur-Solonu at Morjin's command. The scryers who came before us have told of this for six thousand years.'
She went on to say that Morjin had never learned the art of mak-ing the red gelstei, for after nearly being killed creating the relb, he had grown deathly afraid of all such crystals. And so he had left their making to others. Kaspar Saranom had been the first on Ea to forge a firestone. That he had forged only one, Mithuna seemed certain.
'After the Tower was destroyed,' Mithuna said, 'Morjin wanted Kaspar to burn down every town from here to Tria. But Kaspar refused. For his defiance, Morjin had him crucified along with the scryers.'
Here Master Juwain came forward and said, 'This is news indeed. Then Kaspar Saranorn, not Petram, was the first to have made the red gelstei. His name will be remembered.'
'Ha,' Kane said, 'it's greater news that Morjin didn't know the art of making the flrestones. We can hope he never learned it.'
'Then this stone,'Master Juwain said, daring to touch Maram's crystal, 'would be the first firestone ever made.'
'. So – and we can hope it's the last remaining earth.'
We all looked at the firestone in a new light as Maram held it out and marveled at it.
'it's growing late,' Mithuna said again. 'Will you come with us, Atara?'
'No,' Atara said,'I'll stay with my friends.'
'Then we'll return tomorrow,' Mithuna said, 'Good night.' And with that, she gathered her sister scryers around her, lad they walked off into the deep shadows of the mountains.
'A beautiful woman,' Maram said to me after she was gone. 'How long do you think it's been since she did more than, ah, look at a man?'
'She's a scryer of an oracle,' I told him. 'Therefore she must have taken vows of celibacy.'
'Well, so have I.'
'Ha!' Kane said, stepping up to him. 'You might as well try to love this crystal as a scryer!'
Maram look down at the firestone in his hand and muttered, 'Ah, well perhaps I will.'
We camped that night by the stream where the ancient scryers had built their baths.
It was a long, dark night of dreams and brilliant stars. The wind blew unceasingly down from the mountains to the north. Altaru and the other horses were restless, more than once whinnying and pulling at their picket stakes. In the dark notch of the Tur-Soloru, the rains gleamed faintly in the starlight like bleached and broken bones defying time.
Atara, lying on top of the inconstant earth with its whirling and numinous fires, sweated and turned in a sleep that wasn't quite sleep. Her murmurs and cries kept me awake most of the night Nightmares I had suffered through with her before as she had with me. But this was something different. I felt something vast and bottomless as the sea pulling her down into its onstreaming currents. There, in the turbid darkness, Atara screamed silently in fascination and fear, and I wanted to scream, too.
We were all grateful the next day for the rising of the sun. When I asked Atara what she had seen in her sleep, she looked at me strangely as an uncharacteristic coldness came over her. Then she told me, 'If I had been blind from birth and asked you to describe the color of the sky to me, what would you say?'
I looked above the mountains, with their silvery rocks and emerald trees sparkling in the sun. There the sky was a blue dome growing bluer by the moment.
'I would say that it is the deepest of colors, the softest and the kindest, too. In the blue of morning, we find ourselves soaring with hope; in the blue of night, with infinite possibilities. In its opening out onto everything, we remember who we really are.'
'Perhaps you should have been a minstrel instead of a warrior,' she said with a wan smile. 'I'm sure I can't do as well.'
'Why don't you try?'
'All right, then,' she said. The sleeplessness that haunted her face convinced me that she had seen
