The next day we had our first sight of Sakai. After a breakfast of fried eggs and toasted rye bread, we set out and soon pushed our way between the two hills where we had encamped. A line of low mountains lay ahead of us. We found a pass cutting through this chain, and worked our way over it. And when we crossed over to the other side, we found that we had come to the end of the Yrnanir's country.
By chance, it seemed, Ymiru had led us to the exact spot on earth that we had first sought. For here was the great hinge in the White Mountains. To our right, toward the south, the line of mountains that we had just crossed quickly gained elevation as they built toward a wall of white peaks running off into the distance. These were the mountains of the Yorgos Range, and most of Elivagar was spread across their ridges and valleys. To our left, toward the south and east, rose the rocky masses of the Nagarshath. It chilled me merely to look up the unbroken chain of these vast upthrustings of the earth, with their jagged, white, ice-frozen crests. There was no way, I thought, that either man or beast could survive in such great heights. Surely our only hope, as we had discussed, was to pass through Sakai by way of the broad plateau opening out between the two mountain ranges straight ahead of us.
'So that is Sakai,' Maram said as we stood by the horses on the side of the mountain. The wind was out of the west, at our backs, and threatened to push us down its slopes. 'Well, I don't like the look of it.'
Neither did I. The land below was windswept and sere, its brown grasses and patches of bare earth already showing occasional shags of snow. It went on and on toward the gray haze of the horizon. I thought I could make out, off in the distance, outcroppings of dark rock marking the face of this forbidding plateau. It did not seem a place where people would live. And yet I knew that when we went down into it, we would likely find nomads herding their flocks – or the Red Dragon's cavalry riding the borders of his dread-ful realm.
'So.' Kane said as the wind whipped up his snowy hair. 'So.'
Atara stood near me, staring down into Sakai as if she had seen it before in her crystal sphere.
Maram looked at Ymiru doubtfully. 'You said that you've led raids down into that?'
'No, not here,' Ymiru said. 'Our battles with the Beast's armies were almost a hundred miles to the south.'
'But you still propose to lead us across it?'
'No,' Ymiru said, 'I don't.'
We all looked at him in surprise, even as did Maram, who said, 'But you were to lead us through Sakai. Has seeing it changed your mind?'
'I will lead you through Sakai,' Ymiru said. His hard blue eyes looked to the left as he pointed at the mountains of the Nagarshath. 'That, too, be Sakai.'
Although the wind was burning Maram's face bright red, for a moment the color drained from his cheeks. 'But there's no way through those mountains!'
'No, there be a way,' Ymiru said. The coldness of his eyes made me want to shiver.
'An ancient way – we call it the Wailing Way.'
He told us that long ago his ancestors had built a system of roads, tunnels and bridges through the Nagarshath in order to help them fight their wars against Morjin.
There, along the icy peaks of these high mountains, the wind wailed almost continually. And there, too, the mothers of the Ymanir had wailed for many hundreds of years to see so many of their sons and daughters slain.
'It took the Beast a long, long time to drive us from the Nagarshath,' Ymiru told us.
'But the mountains were too vast, and we were too few to defend them. So in the end we had to retreat to Elivagar.'
'But surely, then,' Maram said, 'the Red Dragon's men now guard this Wailing Way of yours.'
'No, they would have no reason to – none of my people has been that way for a thousand years.'
'You haven't either?'
'No, I haven't.'
'Then how do you know it still exists?'
'It must still exist,' Ymiru said. 'You've seen how my people build things.'
'But what if the Red Dragon has destroyed it?'
'It is my hrope that he has not,' Ymiru said. 'You see, it was a secret way, and it may be that his men never found it.'
We all stood wondering if Ymiru could find his way through these terrible mountains and so lead us to Argattha through Sakai's back door. In answer, he took off his pack and removed the paper-wrapped package that Burri had given him. It took him only a moment to open it and take out his fathers map.
'What is that?' Maram said crowding close to look at it.
Ymiru held in his hands what seemed a pair of lacquered boards, square in shape and inlaid with various dark woods. With great care Ymiru suddenly pulled away the top board, which was set neatly against the bottom board's rune-carved frame so as to protect its interior surface. This was a smaller square within a square, wrought of a reddish-brown substance that looked much like clay. Indeed Ymiru called it living clay, and said that his great- grandfather had crafted it nearly ninety years before.
'This be one thing my people haven't lost,' Ymiru said. 'Almost every Ymanir family has such a map.'
Maram suddenly reached out his finger to run it over the clay's smooth, unbroken surface. And then Ymiru's great voice suddenly bellowed out and froze him motionless: 'Don't touch that! The living clay must never be touched, or else you'll ruin the map!'
Maram jerked back his hand as if from a heated iron. He said, 'I don't understand how you can call this a map.'
'Watch, little man,' Ymiru said to him. 'If I be steady of hand and clear of mind, you'll see something you've never seen.'
As Ymiru oriented his father's map toward the mountains of the Nagarshath, we all gathered in as close as we could. We watched at Ymiru closed his eyes and slowly shifted the position of his furry feet about the bare ground. He seemed to draw strength from it and something else. Almost as slowly as the turning of the earth, he rotated the clay-laden board, apparently seeking to position it along lines that only he could apprehend.
And then without warning, the map's living day began moving about as if being molded by invisible hands. In places, fissures and furrows marked its rippling surface even as bits of day formed themselves into ridges and crests, and thrust upward in long, jagged lines that looked like miniature mountain ranges. It took very little time for this transformation to occur. But when it was completed, as I saw to my amazement, Ymiru held in his hands an exact replica of the mountains that lay before us.
'This be a map of the nearer mountains of the Nagarshath,' Ymiru said, opening his eyes. He pointed down with his chin. 'Do you see the valley behind the front range?'
Of course, we all could make out the deep groove in the clay behind the map's front mountain. s But when I looked out at the world, through the cold- air that hung heavy beneath the blue sky, all I could see was a vast, white wall of rocky peaks edging Sakai's umber plateau. If a valley lay beyond these very real mountains, the map could see it but I couldn't.
'If the map is true,' Master Juwain said, pointing his finger at the gleaming clay, 'then it seems the valley runs for many miles.'
'The map be true,' Ymiru said, looking down at it proudly. 'And the valley be nearly eighty miles long. It will take us a third of the way to Argattha.'
'But what is the magic of this map?' Maram asked him. 'I've never heard of such magic.'
Ymiru's eyes warmed as he looked out upon Sakai. And then to Maram, he said,
'The world be a great and glorious place. And through it, along its valleys and rivers and within its hills, pulses the currents of the earth – much as your blood pulses through your big nose and follows its contours. The living clay resonates with these currents. And so it hrolds within its form the forms of the earth.'
Master Juwain s clear gray eyes fixed on the map. And then he said, 'But not all the earth, it seems.'
'No, there be a limit to what the map can model,' Ymiru said. 'If it be oriented with the greatest skill, it will show the terrain ahead to a distance of a hundred miles but no more.'
Then,' I said, pointing at the edge of the map, 'there is no way for us to know what lies beyond this valley.'
'No, not until we've covered some further distance,' Ymiru said. 'But it be my hrope that we'll find other
