We brought out two large rain cloths, and propped them up with sticks. Then we all sat around in a circle beneath them staring at the heap of sodden wood through the dying light. Liljana had taken Daj under her cloak, and Atara likewise sheltered Estrella. We listened to the rain patter against pungent-smelling wool and break against the leaves of the trees towering above us.
Atara oriented her soaked blindfold toward Maram's crystal, and she said, 'Do you remember the prophecy concerning your fire-stone?'
'Do you mean, that it will bring Morjin's doom?'
'Yes. But I can't see how it ever will.'
'That's because you've no faith that it will be made whole again. I
know
it will,' Maram said. He sighed as he pointed his crystal northwest, toward Argattha. 'And
then
I'll make a fire such as has never been seen on Ea, I swear I will.
Then
I'll roast Morjin like a damn worm!'
'Ha!' Kane said, coming over to clap him on the shoulder. 'You can't even roast a little lamb for our dinner! Well, it will have to be cold cheese and battle biscuits for us tonight, then.'
And so it was. We sat in the driving rain eating these unappealing rations with resignation. Our two cloths did not keep this slanting deluge from soaking us. Maram complained for the hundredth time that we should lave brought tents with us, and for the hundredth time Kane explained that tents were much too bulky and heavy for our horses, which were already weighted down with our supplies. In truth, they could not carry enough oats and food to take us even half the way to Hesperu; this arithmetic reality of constant subtraction would compel us to replenish our stores along the way and Kane bitterly resented this necessity.
'But there's no help for it,' Maram said.
'No help, you say? I say we could jettison certain stores to make room for more food.'
Maram cast Kane a suspicious look and said, 'I hope you don't mean the beer and the brandy!'
Kane turned up his wrists and let the rain gather in his cupped hands. 'It seems we won't lack for drink, at least until we reach the desert.'
'Brandy,' Maram said, 'is
not
just drink - it's medicine. And one that is badly needed on such a night. We could all use a little of its fire.'
Master Juwain, however, was not quite ready to concede this need. He said to Maram, 'Why don't you practice moving the kundalini fire up your spine, as Abrasax taught you. That would warm you better.'
'Ah, a woman would warm me better still,' he moaned. 'If only I had a good tent against the rain, and my sleeping furs were dry, I'd crawl inside with her, wrap my arms around her poor, cold, shivering body, and then, like flint and steel, like a match held to a barrel of pitch, like a poker plunging into a bed of coals, I'd -'
'Maram,' I said to him, 'I thought you'd learned to redirect this fire of yours?'
'Well, what if I have?' he said. 'I
could
redirect it, as you say, if I wanted to - I'm sure I could. But why should I want to? It's too hard, too uncertain; too ... unnatural, if you know what I mean. I'm a man who was born to live on the earth, not the stars. And it's been too long since I held a woman in my arms, much too long.'
And with this lamentation, he tried to settle in to sleep for the night as best, he could. And so did the rest of us. But it rained all that night, and we awoke to a dull gray light fighting its way through the gray clouds above us and slatelike sheets of rain. We fought against the ache of our cold, stiff limbs to get under way and continue on down the valley. The squish of the horses' hooves against mud and soaking bracken was nearly drowned out by the rushing of the river and the unceasing rain.
By mid-afternoon, however, this torrent had let up slightly. And then, as the valley gave out into lower and flatter country, it dried up to a stiff drizzle. So it was that we at last entered the great Acadian forest. This vast expanse of woods stretched from Sakai in the northwest five hundred miles to the borders of Uskadar and Karabuk in the southeast. We proposed to cross it, east to west, along a route through its northern part less than two hundred miles long. This would take us well to the north of Varkeva, Acadu's greatest and only real city. And north, as well, we hoped, of that dark place of which Abrasax had warned us. Master Juwain had brought with him a map of Acadu, little good that it would do us. It showed Acadu's few main roads, but these we could not take. Into the map's tough parchment was inked the position of the few bridges across Acadu's rivers, but we would have to find fords or ferrymen to help us along our way.
It did not distress me to set out into this strange woods without any path to guide us. Maram often envied my sense of direction, even as he called it uncanny, even otherworldly. I had been born knowing in my blood east from west, north from south, with all the certainty of a ship's pilot steering a course by the stars. Even on such a dark, sunless day as this I had no trouble leading my companions due-west.
The openness of the woods here made my task all the simpler. We needed no road or game track to wend our way beneath the great oaks and elms, for the ground of the forest was remarkably free of shrubbery, deadwood or other entanglements. Grass grew in many places, beneath the trees and in clearings where they had been cut down. Antelope and sheep, in goodly-sized herds, grazed upon the grass. Atara drew an arrow and pointed it toward one of these fat sheep, whose spiral horns curling close to its head resembled a helmet. But then she lowered her bow as she thought better of killing it.
'We have uncooked lamb wrapped in store already,' she said, 'and who knows if we'll be able to cook tonight - or tomorrow?'
At this observation, not meant as a jibe, Maram's face pulled into an angry pout, but he said nothing.
'At least,' I said, 'it seems we won't lack for meat here. I've never seen a wood so rich with game.'
And that, as Master Juwain informed us, was not due to any natural bounty of Acadu but rather the design of man. From one of the books in the Brothers' library, he had learned that the Acadians, many of them, disdained the hard work of farming such crops as potatoes or barley, and therefore farmed animals instead. Each autumn, when the forest floor grew bone dry, they would set fires to burn out the undergrowth. Grass grew in its place, and animals such as sheep and antelope - and deer, wild cattle and even a few sagosk - grew fat and strong upon the grass.
Indeed, the whole of this great wood teemed with life. As we rode our horses beneath miles of an emerald-green canopy, racoons and squirrels scurried out of our way, and we saw foxes, wood voles and skunks, too. Many of the trees were like old friends to me, and it gladdened my heart to see the oaks, birch and hickory standing so straight and tall. Other kinds, holly and chestnut, were rarer in the Morning Mountains and in other lands through which I had journeyed. And there were trees that I had never laid eyes on before, two of which Master Juwain identified as hornbeam and hackberry, with its bushy, drooping leaves that looked something like a witch's broom, or so he said. Many bees buzzed in fields of flowers: day's eyes, dandelions and sprays of white yarrow. There seemed to be few mosquitoes about, however, or any of the other vermin that had so tormented us in the Vardaloon. It was truly one of the loveliest forests I had ever beheld.
And yet, from the moment I set out to cross Acadu, I felt ill at ease. What little we knew about this lost place, I thought, would be enough to disquiet anyone. It seemed that many years ago, twenty-three 'kings' had held sway between the two great, lower ranges of the White Mountains. Now Morjin claimed it. Not being willing to commit any great force to subdue this wild country, the Red Dragon instead had sent into its vast reaches corps of assassins and his Red Priests, to murder, maim and persuade, to terrorize the scattered Acadians into submitting to his will.
This danger, however, was known and quantifiable, even if we presently had no news as to our enemy's position or numbers. What vexed me more was the
unknown:
rumors of strange beasts that could suck the life out of a man's limbs with a flash of their eyes and even turn a man into stone. Had Morjin, I wondered, also sent cadres of the terrible Grays into Acadu? Worst of all, I thought, was the dread of the dark place called the Skadarak that Abrasax had warned of. Even the glory of the orange hawkweed over which we trod and the burst of scarlet feathers of a tanager flying across our path could not drive this foreboding from me. I could almost smell its blackness, like a fetor tainting the perfume of the periwinkles and other flowers around us. It seemed to whisper to me like an ill wind, to call to me faintly and from far away.
As we made camp at day's end, I sensed that none of my friends felt the pull of this place - at least not yet. They set to work drawing water and building our rudimentary fortifications out of wet logs with good cheer. This diminished somewhat when Maram yet again failed to make a fire. But the rain finally stopped, and the patch of blue that broke from the clouds just before dusk promised better weather for travel the next morning, and we all hoped, drier wood.
For all the next day, we journeyed as straight a course west as I could guide us. We encountered no people - only some rabbits, deer and chittering birds - and that was to our purpose. A few low hills rose up to block our way, and we had no trouble skirting them. The sun, pouring down through the numerous breaks in the trees, warmed us. It dried out the woods, as well. That night Maram finally succeeded in striking up a fire: a good, hot, crackling one. But when Liljana unpacked the leg of lamb to roast it she wrinkled up her face as she sniffed at it and said, 'Whew - it's gone bad!'
Kane came over to test it with his nose, and said, 'It's a little off, it's true. But I've eaten worse. Why don't you roast it, anyway?'
'And poison the children?' she asked him as she rested her arm across Estrella's shoulder. 'Will
you
care for them if they fall ill?'
She told him that he could roast the lamb if he wished, and eat it himself as well. But as none of the rest of us was eager to put tooth or tongue to this tainted flesh, Kane picked up the lamb's leg and flung it far out into the woods. He said, 'I'll not feast in front of the rest of you. Let the foxes or racoons have a good meal.
They,
at least, aren't particular.'
Liljana, undeterred, set to preparing us what she called a good meal' anyway: fried eggs and rashers of bacon, wheat cakes spread with apple butter and some freshly picked newberries for desert. We went to bed warm that night and with full bellies. Even the howling of wolves from somewhere deeper in the woods did not disturb our sleep.
Just after daybreak we set out again toward the west Atara, bow in hand, determined to take one of the woods' wild sheep for our dinner, or perhaps a deer. But all that morning, strangely, we saw no game larger than a skunk. The wind through the trees reminded me of the faroff whispering that I had first sensed upon entering Acadu. It carried as well a faint reck of rotting flesh. Altaru smelled this stench before I did; the twitching of his great, black nostrils and a nervous nicker from within his throat alerted me to it. We walked on two more miles beneath the maple and hack-berry trees, and it grew stronger, nearly choking us. And then, a hundred yards farther along, we came out into a grassy clearing littered with the carcasses of sheep. They lay in twisted heaps. There were thirty-three of them, as I quickly counted. All had been killed with black arrows fired through their bloodstained white wool.
'Oh, Lord!' Maram called out in a muffled voice. He held his scarf over his mouth and nose. 'The poor little lambs! Who would slaughter so many and leave them here to rot?'
It was a question that almost needed no answer. The black arrows, as Kane quickly determined, were Sakai-made and stamped with the mark of the Red Dragon.
'Hmmph,' Atara said, walking around the edge of the massacred herd. 'Morjin's men must have arrows in abundance, to waste so many leaving them this way.'
'It's not waste at all,' I said, suddenly understanding the purpose behind this dreadful deed. 'At least, not waste as Morjin's men would count it. Surely they left the arrows as an advertisement.'
'A warning, you mean,' Maram said. 'And it's all the warning
I
need to flee this district.'
Kane, sniffing at one of the sheep and testing the rigidity of its limbs, said to him, 'These beasts are three days dead. Whoever did this is likely long gone.'
'So
you
say,' Maram grumbled.
'What is strange,' Master Juwain said, 'is that none of the scavengers have gone to work here.'
No, no,
I thought. I reeled before the fire that sucked in through my nose and burned through my blood.
It is not strange at all.
Liljana, as well as Kane, dared to uncover her face in order to take in the stench of the rotting sheep. And she said, 'I think these arrows were poisoned with kirax. It taints the flesh so that when it turns, it gives off an odor like burning hair. If I can smell it, so can the badgers and bears.'
On the lips of many of the sheep, I saw, black blood drew swarms of buzzing flies. I guessed that the sheep had gnashed their jaws together in a maddened frenzy that severed tongues and broke teeth, so great was the agony of the kirax.
'Lets leave here,' I said, 'as quickly as we can.'
'Very well,' Master Juwain said to me. 'But we'll have a difficult choice to make, and soon. How far into Acadu do you think we've
come?'
'Forty miles,' I said. 'Perhaps forty-five. If your map is right, we should find the Tir River in another five miles or so.'
'And how do you propose we cross it?'
'Come,' I said to him. and to the others as I remounted my horse. 'Let's go on to this river, and then well see about crossing it.'
As we rode through a patch of oaks, the soft wind in our faces drove away the stench of the murdered sheep. Despite Kane's assurances to Maram, Kane scanned the woods about us with his sharp black eyes, looking for the sheep's killers, and I did, too. After about four miles, the air grew more humid, and we heard the rushing of water through the trees. We pushed through some dense undergrowth to find the Tir River raging through the forest in full flood.