Black Jade Page 27

  'So, you've led us into a trap!' Kane snarled at him.

  The day's first light barely sufficed to show the gray trunks of trees all around us and the bracken low and grayish green along the forest floor. The morning mist filled the silent woods. Between the trees, I saw, through the swirls of mist stood men in a great circle around us. There must have been more than thirty of them. They wore long, hooded cloaks and bore bows and arrows, which they pulled back on almost invisible strings. They seemed to be waiting for a signal or call.

  'Kill me,' Berkuar said to Kane, 'and you'll die with a dozen arrows in you - your friends, too!'

  Maram, crouching low as if he hoped our flimsy fortifications would be enough to shield him, cried out, 'Is it the Grays, then? No, no - there are too many for a company of Grays, and the Stonefaces bear knives, not bows, don't they?'

  'We are the Greens,' Berkuar told him. Then he turned to Kane. 'We are the Keepers of the Forest, and it is upon us to keep the enemy out of Acadu. If you are one of them, then this is indeed a trap.'

  'We've told you who we are!' Kane said as he tightened the tension on his bow.

  It was a rare man who could stare down Kane in all his fury, but Berkuar seemed unconcerned with the prospect of his imminent death. He said to Kane, 'You've told of a quest to find the Well of Restoration and names that I do not believe are yours.'

  'We killed your enemies!'

  'You killed that traitor, Harwell, and his cursed Crucifiers, and they were our enemies. But were they really yours, as well? Or did you arrange the attack on Gladwater and sacrifice them to win my confidence? The Kallimun have done more deceptive things, and worse, to try to win their way into the trust of our society.'

  The mist thinned to reveal the men surrounding us. Kane finally blinked his eyes then. But he did not loose his arrow. I felt his consternation, like an acid, at being confronted by a man even more suspicious than he was.

  'Val,' he whispered to me.

  He nodded at me as if to confess that his own evil mistrust had brought these men down on us. With his eyes, he sought my forgiveness and looked to me to put things aright.

  Then Berkuar let loose a whistle like that of a goldfinch. Kane turned his attention back to him and to the Greens, about thirty of them, who slowly began advancing upon us through the woods like a tightening noose.

  'What is your name?' Berkuar asked me. 'The one you were born with?'

  I hesitated only a moment, then said, 'Valashu Elahad. Of Mesh.'

  Then I gave him the names of my companions and the lands that had birthed them, as far as I knew. Estrella could not tell of her origins, and as for Kane, no one knew what name his father and mother had spoken on the hour of his birth - perhaps not even Kane himself.

  'And what of this Well of Restoration then? Do you really seek it?'

  My breath rose and fell as I looked into Berkuar's blue eyes, now gray in the early light. His breath, too, came quickly, like a bird's, as he looked back at me. There dwelled within me, I knew, a great power: that if I told the truth, utterly and completely, with all my heart, men would believe me.

  'We seek the Lightstone,' I said to him. 'Or rather, the one who can wield it who is called the Maitreya.'

  As quickly as I could, in a low voice that he strained to hear, I told Mm of our struggles against Morjin and of our quest to faroff Hesperu.

  'What is he saying?' one of the Greens beyond our encampment called out to us. This proved to be a big man named Gorman, who was as thick and shaggy as a sagosk. 'Give the word and we'll fill him with arrows!'

  'Let us kill them all, anyway, and be done with it!' another said. This man, almost as tall as I, was thin and angular like a piece of overly whittled wood.

  'Kill the summoner?' a third Green cried out. 'Didn't you see how he called down the hawk? Would you have him call down a dragon upon us?'

  Berkuar ignored them and continued to regard me strangely. At last he said to me quietly, 'That hawk's heart was as true as my own, and I cannot think that such a bird would have given his trust to our enemy. I believe you. And I believe your story, incredible as it is, though it seems that I haven't heard the tenth part of it.'

  So saying, he motioned for his fellow woodsmen to lower their bows, then stepped straight toward me within reach of my sword. He paid this terrible weapon no heed. Then he embraced me, clasping me to his hard, hairy body with all the strength of a bear. His lips pulled back to show his barbark-stained teeth. It was the first time I had seen him smile.

  After that, I persuaded Kane to help me tear open our wooden fence, and we invited the thirty Greens to share breakfast with us. Most of these grim men remained wary of us, though they were inclined to accept my friendship with the hawk as a powerful -and good - sign. Then Berkuar told them of what had befallen in Gladwater and of our part in the battle at the longhouse; they hadn't known of this for they ranged the wild lands west, of the Tir. A few of them had wives and children in Gladwater, though, and were overjoyed to learn from Berkuar that they still lived. They came up to me and clasped my hand in thanks. They even thanked Kane for his savage knifework in the grove behind the longhouse. They appreciated prowess with the knife almost as much as with the bow and arrows.

  And so on that misty morning we made together a small feast. Fires were lit from the wood of our fortifications. Venison was roasted, and stories were told. Berkuar respected the need to keep at least part of our past and our present quest a secret. Who knew better than this embattled Acadian how even the hardest of men might break and betray his friends if nailed to a cross or threatened with seeing his children tortured?

  Between bites of blackened deer meat Berkuar said, 'These are the worst of times, and strange, too. There are bad things in the deep woods. I've heard stories of woodcutters whose minds the Crucificr has seized and forced like puppets to his will so that they chop down friends and family with their axes - and I believe them. There are the ones you call the Grays. They freeze men's blood like winter does water, and steal children from their beds. Something, in the woods to the far west, turns men to stone. And then there is the Skadarak.'

  I shivered to hear Berkuar say this word. Seeing this, he went on.

  'It is,' he said, 'a bad, bad place. There, the trees grow black and twisted, and the animals devour their own young. Pass nearby it, and it draws you without your knowing you are being drawn. Take the wrong path through the forest, and it will capture you like a fly in a spider's web. And then the Dark Thing will devour you.'

  'But what it this "Dark Thing"?' Maram asked him.

  'It is the Skadarak,' Berkuar said simply, staring at Maram. 'Haven't you listened to what I've said?'

  He went on to explain that in the Skadarak, the forest itself was like an living entity: ancient, powerful and malevolent.

  'We've been advised,' I said to Berkuar, 'to avoid this place.'

  'And good advice that is. But if you're journeying west to the Red Desert, it won't be so easy to avoid.'

  'Why not? Do you not know where it lies? Can't we bypass it?'

  'I know where it lies,' Berkuar said. 'But how will you bypass it? To the north of the Skadarak, in the hills, you'll find the mineworks. There the Red Priests and the soldiers are as thick as flies on a flayed ewe. To the south, for a hundred miles, are the Cold Marshes. And to the south of that lie the lands around Varkeva, where the armies of Urwin the Lame and cadres of Red Priests, the Grays, too, would likely discover you - and likely blame you when the news of what happened at Gladwater gets out.'

  I thought about this as I took a bite of deer meat, which was charred black on the outside and bloody red inside, the way the Greens liked to eat it. And I said, 'But you who wear the green must range your land freely, if you're to fight your enemies as you do. How would you cross Acadu then?'

  Pittock, the tall, angular man I had noticed earlier, answered for Berkuar, saying, 'If we were journeying west, we would cross the mine lands where the hills are most broken, or pass south o
f the Cold Marshes. But we do not journey as you do.'

  'What do you mean?' Maram asked him.

  'We can climb walls of bare rock where we have to. We've no horses to whinny and snort, and leave tracks in the ground as deep as a pond,' he explained. Then he looked pointedly at Maram. 'And we don't trample the bracken as loudly as an ox - we go on foot, as silent as deer and nearly as invisible as weryan.'

  'Weryan?' Maram said. 'What is that - I've never heard of such an animal?'

  'That is because no one has ever seen one,' Pittock said mysteriously - and maddeningly.

  Berkuar was no help in telling anything more about these 'invisible', and probably fantastical, beasts. But then, as his jaw set and he seemed to come to a decision, I looked upon him as a guiding angel, for he said, 'There is a way through the wild woods, north of the Cold Marshes yet just south of the Skadarak. A narrow way. I know I can find a path through it.'

  'Are you sure?' Maram asked him. 'We were warned not to go near that place, and this doesn't seem very much like avoiding it.'

  Berkuar shrugged his shoulders then spat into the fire. 'You have your choice then: the likelihood of keeping an arm's distance from the Skadarak against the near certainty of being discovered by the Red Priests.'

  'Oh, excellent!' Maram said, looking up past the branches of the trees toward the sky. 'Why am I always so fortunate as to be given such wonderful choices?'

  I tried not to laugh as I looked at Berkuar. 'If you would guide us past the Skadarak, we would be fortunate indeed.'

  'I will guide you past it,' Berkuar said, 'all the way to the mountains where Acadu comes to an end.'

  He smiled at me as we clasped hands to set the seal of our new fellowship. Then he choose out Gorman, Pittock and a dark, hard-looking man named Jastor to accompany us as well.

  'But what of the rest of you?' Maram asked as his hand swept out toward the thirty other Greens eating their breakfasts around the other fires. 'Whatever dangers we'll find between here and the mountains would be better met with thirty extras archers than with three.'

  'Perhaps they would,' Berkuar said to him. 'But we've dangers of our own to deal with. And vengeance to be meted.'

  Here he looked at a lean, gray-haired man named Tarl, whom I took to be one of the Greens' captains. A series of whistles, like that of two singing larks, passed between them. Then Berkuar said, 'My men have the survivors of Gladwater to look after. And the enemy to look for. The Red Priest called Edric sent Harwell and the Crucifiers into the woods near Gladwater. He'll be hunted down and killed like the snake he is.'

  So, I thought, as I sipped from a mug of tea that Liljana had brewed for us, one or more of the Greens would find Edric, perhaps leading a company of Crucifiers through the woods against Riversong or some other village along the Tir. They would surprise him through the trees and kill him with arrows. And then Arch Yatin would send other Red Priests and soldiers, in greater numbers, to crucify and slay in vengeance of their own, and the cycle of death would grow only greater and would go on and on. Who was I to stop it? I, who had brought so much death and destruction down upon my countrymen and those whom I most loved? Truly, I hated war as I hated Morjin himself, but there would be no end to it until the Shining One was found and claimed mastery of the Lightstone. Toward this single purpose I must direct all my will, for I could see no other hope.

  And so I swallowed my bitter tea, and looked at Tarl and the other Greens in silence. In an hour, after breakfast, they would journey on east to seek their fate, while my friends and I, led by Berkuar and his three fellow woodsmen, would try to force our way deeper into the darkest of woods.

  Chapter 13

  We moved at a good speed through the woods all that day. A few miles farther on, we forded the Iskand, as Berkuar had promised, and came out into more open woods again. Many people lived in this part of Acadu, spread out between the Iskand and the great Ea River, and Berkuar and his men knew many of them. But they chose paths that led around and away from the villages and even the small farms breaking the forest. Although we might have replenished our supplies and so conserved them, Berkuar agreed with Kane that we should keep our presence in Acadu a secret, if that was any longer possible. In any case, he and his fellows mostly disdained the soft, farm foods that he might have requisitioned from his countrymen, choosing instead to depend on their bows to put meat on the table, so to speak. Freshly-killed deer, boar and wild sheep, nuts and fruit such as blackberries and apples - this was most of what the Greens liked to eat.

  As Pittock told us proudly, the Greens' culinary preferences gave them great stamina and strength, like unto that of roving wolves. He and the others padded along besides our horses through bracken or over old leaves at a pace better managed by four legs than two. But Pittock's two legs, as Pittock told us, were as hard as wood and his breath was like the west wind itself. The Greens could walk thirty miles without stopping, at need, pause for a few bites of bloody venison, and then walk thirty more.

  That afternoon, in a district full of cherry orchards all snowy with white blossoms, we came to the Ea River. Berkuar knew of a ferryman who took us across it. Maram, thankful at putting this great water behind us, wanted to give the ferryman a gold piece for his efforts, but Berkuar discouraged such largess. He pointed out that the ferryman was likely already suspicious that we weren't really 'pilgrims' at all, and it wouldn't do for him to think that we were rich as merchants, too.

  After traversing some miles of farmland to the west of the Ea, the farms thinned out as the forest gradually thickened. Soon, the ground rose into a more hilly country, where the woods grew even wilder. We chose a good spot to camp for the night beneath some mighty oaks and by a stream that gurgled down from these low hills.

  'The mines are not far from here,' Berkuar told us as we unpacked the horses. He pointed into the wall of trees to the west. 'Twenty miles yon way, the hills rise higher, and there the Crucifier's men dig for gold. The line of hills runs thirty miles south, toward the Skadarak.'

  'And what is the length and breadth of that place?' Master Juwain asked him as he unfolded his map and smoothed out the creases.

  'No one knows with certainty,' Berkuar said. 'But if we make a great roundabout along these hills, as we must if we're to avoid the Crucifiers, for fifty miles, we'll come to the Cold Marshes. There we'll turn west again along the lower edge of the Skadarak.'

  Master Juwain then put to Berkuar the very question that a very nervous Maram obviously trembled to ask: 'But if you don't know the precise dimensions of the Skadarak, how do you know there is a way past it, between the marshlands and it?'

  'Because,' Berkuar said, 'my father once ventured that way and lived to tell of it. Unless the Skadarak has grown these past years, we'll find the same way that he did.'

  'Unless it has grown!' Maram cried out. 'Do you have reason to think it has? Oh, I don't like the prospect of this at all, not even a dram's worth of spit!'

  This proved to be a cue for Jastor and Gorman to spit thin red streams at the ground, both at once, for they chewed the barbark nut as did Berkuar and the merciless-looking Pittock. This gaunt mam, whose cheeks were carved with scars, stared at Maram and said, 'Berkuar has told us little more about you than that you are a knight of Mesh, which is said to lie in the Morning Mountains, wherever that is. Do the knights of your land then make such complaint when compelled to face dangers?'

  'I was bom in Delu,' Maram told him. 'And, yes, we Delians, being more reasonable, as well as more civilized, do make complaint where complaint is called for. As it is when facing not just dangers, but sheer madness.'

  Maram took a sip of water from his cup and swirled it about in his mouth as if he wished it were brandy. And then he added, 'And as for dangers, you can't imagine. I, myself, have stood against the siege of a great city and fought the Lord of Lies' Dragon Guard lance to lance in a great battle. And crossed the earth's highest mountains and fought a fire-breathing dragon and -'

  I reached over and laid
my hand on Maram's knee to silence him. Berkuar, according to the Greens' way, had told his three fellow woodsmen what they needed to know about us, and nothing more. He, himself, knew very little. But later that night, with the moon brightening the leaves of the trees above us, I joined him by the fortifications of our encampment, and we spoke of many things. I told him what I knew about the Maitreya. He, being a devout man in his crude, violent way, had memorized many passages from the Saganom Elu, though he could not read. He surprised me, reciting to me words that cut me to the heart:

  About the Maitreya One thing is known:

  That to himself

  He always is known

  When the moment comes

  To claim the Lightstone.

  'If this is true, as it must be,' he said to me, 'then since the Crucifier now keeps the Lightstone, the Maitreya would likely not even know himself as he really is. So how will you, Valashu, recognize him?'

  And I told him, 'This is not written in the Saganom Elu, but it is true nevertheless. The Maitreya is he who will abide, at all times, under any circumstances, in the One. He will look upon all with an equal eye. And in his heart, like fire, will blaze an unshake-able courage.'

  'Such valor,' Berkuar said, gripping the leather wrappings of his bow. 'Such impossible grace. I believe it must be so. But a million men live in Hesperu. You can't search out every one and look into his eyes to find this fire.'

  'No,' I said, 'we cannot.'

  Then I told him of Kasandra's prophecy that Estrella would show us the Maitreya.

  'I see,' Berkuar said as he sucked on a barbark nut. 'Now I understand why you've brought children with you.' 'It seemed the only way,' I said.

  'The only way,' he murmured as his eyes caught the gleam of the moonlight. 'Yes, I believe there is a way - there must be This must be the time, then. The Shining One will come forth! I never dreamed that I might live to see such a day!'