He went on to say that one's will must be tempered like the toughest of steels and sharpened so that it cut through all fear; it must be polished to a mirrorlike finish so as to cast back to Morjin all his illusions, nightmares and lies.
'Isn't this what I've always said?' Master Juwain asked, turning toward me. 'Have you been doing the exercises I taught you, Val?'
I remembered him telling me how I must create an ally who would watch over me in my sleep and guard me from evil dreams, I shook my head as I told him, 'After the Grays' deaths, there seemed no need.'
'I see,' Master Juwain said. 'Then perhaps it's time for some new lessons.'
'Yes, perhaps it is, sir.'
'And the dreams are the least of it,' he went on. 'While you're awake, you must try to turn your thoughts away from the Lord of Lies.'
I bowed my head in acknowledgement that this was so.
'And so must you, Liljana,' Master Juwain said, pointing at her blue crystal. 'Of all of us save Val, you must be the most careful.'
'Of course I will,' she told him. 'Have you known me to be other-wise?'
Master Juwain sighed as he rubbed the back of his head. 'Will you promise that if you do use your gelstei, you'll refrain from trying to see what is in the Red Dragon's mind?'
'Of course I will,' she said again. 'I think I know too well what is in such men's minds.'
Her offhand dismissal of Morjin as merely a man like any other alarmed me. As it did Atara. During our talk of the blue gelstei and mindspeaking, she had been mostly silent. But now she suddenly looked up from her clear crystal and said, 'Beware, Liljana – on the day you touch Morjin's mind, you'll smile no more, nor will you laugh again.'
And that, I thought, as we said good night to each other and settled down onto our sleeping furs, was a warning that we all should heed.
That night I was touched with dark dreams again, and I awakened long before sunrise to watch the clouds blowing in over the ocean and covering up the moon's feeble light. But then I meditated as Master Juwain had taught me; as I fell asleep again, I tried to remain aware of that part of me that never slept and remained always aware. It must have helped, for after that, I dreamed only of my family, whom I missed more than even the mountains of Mesh. My brothers – and my father, mother and grandmother, too – smiled at me from inside the castle of my soul and urged me to complete my quest and return home soon.
The clouds blew away with the rising of the sun, and we were given a fine, bright day for traveling. As we were saddling the horses, Master Juwain looked out at the ocean and said, 'Unless I've missed my count, today is the first of Marud. That's a good month for crossing the sea.'
'Hoy, it's the best of months,' Alphanderry said. 'But where are we to find a ship to cross it?'
That remained our most pressing problem, and we set out toward the west to solve it. We let the horses walk slowly along the beach for a couple of hours. Even though they had eaten their fill of grass during our camp, they were still sluggish in all their motions. They needed a good feed of oats, I knew, to fatten them up and renew their strength. But oats we had none, and neither in this country of sandy beaches and shrubs were we likely to find barley or rye or any other such grain. Altaru kept up his spirits even so. Twice, when I dismounted to walk beside him and give him a rest, he shook his head and kicked the sand as if offended that I doubted his ability to bear me. He was so great-hearted a beast I thought, that he would have plunged into the sea in an effort to swim us across it. What he would make of a ship if ever we came upon one, I didn't know.
After perhaps ten miles, the shoreline curved toward the northwest, even as Kane and Master luwain had decided it must if we had reached the Bay of Whales. Eanna, of course, lay almost due west of us, and we might have ridden straight toward it in that direction, thus cutting a good chunk of country – and many miles – from our journey. But to do so would have meant re-entering the Vardaloon. And as Maram put it he'd rather ride around the coastline of all Ea than go back into that accursed forest again.
And so we hugged the coast as nearly as we could. But with its many coves, headlands and cliffs, we often found ourselves veering quite a few miles inland where the goldenrod, fleabane and other shrubs gave way to a forest of oaks and tall pines that fairly reeked of pitch. We were all very glad to find few mosquitoes there and no leeches or ticks. The bloodbirds that had tormented the horses so terribly seemed to be creatures of the deeper woods, and the fiercest flying things that we saw were some windcatchers who seemed happy to eat the mosquitoes rather than us.
The next day and the day after that found us still working our way to the northwest along the Bay of Whales. But on our fourth day since our talk about the blue gelstei, we came to a rocky prominence that pointed out toward the Northern Ocean. There the coast turned sharply toward the southwest. A hundred miles across these gray- green waters, Master Juwain said, the many small islands of the Nedu archipelago gave way to the those of the Elyssu. He told us that many ships sailed the sea between those islands and the bit of land upon which we stoodBut that day we saw nothing but a few cormorants hovering over the sea,
'Something is worrying you, sir,' I said to Master Juwain as we gazed out at the ocean. The wind off the water whipped my hair about my head, as it did the horses' manes. But Master Juwain, bald as an egg, was spared this nuisance.
'Worrying me?' he said. 'Worrying, well, yes – I'm afraid there is.'
He turned to point along the coast to our left. 'Unless the old maps no longer show the world as it is, fifty miles from this cape, we'll come to a river. The Ardellan, it used to be called. It drains the whole of the Vardaloon and empties into the ocean.
How are we to cross it?'
It might have vexed me that Master Juwain had waited until we had come so far to voice such doubts. But there was no help for it: he was a man who turned thing? over in his mind so thoroughly that he too often supposed what was obvious to him must be to others as well. As it happened, however, I had already discussed the crossing of the Ardellan with Kane.
'We'll build rafts,' I said, 'and float across it.'
'Rafts is it?' Master Juwain said. 'And how are we to build such things?'
The failings of his knowledge made me smile. He could find a herb in a strange wood that would drive away some mysterious fever or tell of the making of the gelstei thousands of years ago. But the making of a simple raft seemed beyond him.
'We'll cut trees,' I told him, 'and tie them together.'
'Trees, is it? Yes, I see, I see.'
Alter making camp that night near a little stream that ran into the sea, we set out to the southwest along the coast early the next morning. The shoreline here grew straighter and gentler and we found that we could keep to the beaches for many long stretches. Twenty-five miles we made that day at a slow walk, and our progress on the day following that was even more encouraging. By the late afternoon, we had our first signs that we were approaching the great river. We saw a flock of long winged azulenes, and Master Juwain said that they were birds of fresh water, not salt. The horses, sniffing at the air, seemed to smell this water beyond the haze of trees and shoreline ahead of us. And so did Liljana.
'We're close,' she told us, pointing along the beach. Ahead of us some four miles, the coast seemed to take a turn to the south. 'That must be the mouth of the Ardellan.'
We rode straight toward it now at a much quickened walk. The beach narrowed and then disappeared altogether, and we were forced to take to the forest that grew almost down to the sea. The trees here were the usual oaks and pines that found root in the sandy soil along true coast. They formed a thick wall blocking any view of the river that we must certainly be drawing nearer. I was glad for the tarry-smelling pines, for they grew stratghter than the oaks and would be much easier to cut. Just as I was wondering how many it would take to build a raft large enough to bear up two or three of the horses, the woods gave out suddenly onto a line of fields. And just beyond these patches of green. I gasped to see a wailed city built along the banks of the wide, blue river.
'I didn't know there were any cities in this part of the world,' Maram said, speaking for all of us. 'Who are these people?'
'Let's find out,' I said, nudging Altaru forward.
In truth, the city was more of a town, being much smaller than Tria – or even Silvassu. And the wall surrounding it was neither magnificent nor formidable: it was made of poles of wood planted down into the moist
