'We
can't
fail, Maram - at least we can't fail each other. And that is why, in the end, we'll win.'
He smiled at this. 'Brave words, my friend, and thank you for them. But I don't know - I just don't know.'
We continued our journey through the warm, open woods, and sometimes Maram's singing swelled with true hope, and sometimes it didn't. This I had learned in the Skadarak: our hearts were always free. Not even the Maitreya, I thought, could save a man who didn't want to be saved. .
For two more days, we traveled into the west toward the mountains. Ashte had passed Into Soldru, and so finally did the clouds above us pass on to the east. The sky cleared, allowing the strong Soldru sun to rain down its blight rays through the glowing, green leaves above us. Arum and marigolds showed their colors in glades covered with grass. Through the occasional breaks in the forest's canopy, we caught glimpses of a great wall of white peaks that grew larger and larger.
At last we came into a thinly-populated part of Acadu that Berkuar seemed to know quite well. He guided us onto game paths and old, narrow roads. Here we might have moved more quickly, but I called for an unhurried pace. We were alt worn from our journey, and Daj and Estrella most of all. They were as tough and uncomplaining as any children could be, but in the end they were still children. We stopped more than once so that they might play by a stream or pick apples from an orchard of one of the farmers who had made a homestead in these lonely woods. One of these, a stout freeholder named Graybuck, invited us to a feast of roasted ham, mashed potatoes and fresh greens picked from his fields. He insisted on plying us with some of his homemade beer, even Maram, whose vows he waved away.
'Beer is the only fit drink for friends,' Graybuck told us, holding forth at table in his long room with his wife and five children. He turned his heavy, red face toward Maram. 'Surely you can put aside your vow this one time to make toast in the company of
friends?'
'Ah, surely I can,' Maram told him. 'A vow is sacred, It's true, but what is more sacred than friendship?'
I said nothing as I watched Graybuck's eldest daughter, Roseen, fill Maram's mug with a frothy brown beer. I bit my lip as I watched the way that Maram watched this plump, young woman go about her business, as if he would rather have had her for dessert in place of apple pie or other sweets.
'To the Keepers of the Forest,' Graybuck said, holding up his mug and nodding at Berkuar. 'May they the drive the Crucifiers from our woods.'
He went on to tell of the depredations of Morjin's soldiers who had raided down from the mine lands to the north. He praised us for having the courage and good guidance to have passed by the Skadarak unharmed, and so avoided these men that he hated.
'They've feared your bows,' he said to Berkuar, 'and so few have dared to come into the deep woods here, though I heard that last year they burnt Finlay's farm not twenty miles from here and carried off his daughters. But if you're journeying south, as you must, you'll find the forest full of soldiers. They've set up a garrison at Nayland, between the Cold Marshes and the mountains.'
'But what if we didn't go around the mountains,' I asked him, 'but across them?'
'Cross the mountains?' Graybuck said to me. 'Not with horses and children. There are no passes over them.'
Kane sipped at his beer as he eyed Graybuck. Then he said, 'No passes at all?'
'Well, there is a narrow gap about thirty miles from here, but it is cursed.'
'Cursed, you say?' Maram called out. 'Cursed
how?'
'It's said that there is something there that turns men to stone.'
'Turns men to stone!' Maram cried out. Then he belched and muttered. 'Oh, excellent, excellent!'
'Surely,' Master Juwain said to Graybuck, 'that cannot be true. Surely it is just a legend.'
'I don't know about that,' Graybuck said to him. 'I've heard people tell of kin lost to this Stonemaker. They call it the Yaga.'
'The Yaga,' Maram muttered again as he gazed into his empty mug.
'But hasn't anyone,' Master Juwain asked, 'ever ventured into this gap to disprove the legend?'
'Would you venture into the Skadarak to disprove that it could capture a man as a spider's web does a fly?'
Master Juwain said nothing as he looked me and rubbed the back of his bald head.
'We keep well away from that part of the mountains and the westernmost reaches of the woods,' Graybuck told us. 'And you will too unless you want to stand like a statue for the rest of your days. Now it's late, and I've an acre of weeds to pull up tomorrow. And so I'll say goodnight.'
Later that evening, after Maram returned from the barn and helping Roseen to milk the cows, as he put it, we held council at the edge of Graybuck's apple orchard, where we had made our encampment. All the way from the Brotherhood's school we had argued as to our course toward Hesperu, and it had come time to make our final decision.
'So, nothing has changed,' Kane said to us, 'We've two routes to Hesperu: through the Dragon lands or across the Red Desert.' 'Six hundred miles through Sunguru the long way?' Master
Juwain sighed out, shaking his head. 'It's bad enough that we have to venture into Hesperu.'
We all agreed to this. However fierce the heat of the Red Desert, it could not be so dangerous as exposing ourselves at every village and town in the heavily populated Sunguru along a course of six hundred miles.
'Then if we're to go into the desert,' Kane said, 'we still have two choices: across the mountains or around them.'
But to go around them, as Graybuck had said, we might very well have to fight our way past the garrison at Nayland. And worse, at the point of the Yorgos range of the White Mountains, where they gave out upon the border between Uskudar and Sunguru, we would find fortresses and yet more garrisons of the armies of both King Orunjan and King Angand.
'But couldn't we just slip around them?' Maram said. 'Better the danger that we
do
know than this stonemaking Yaga that Graybuck told of.'
'But it might turn out to be no danger at all,' Master Juwain said. His gray eyes fairly glowed with curiosity. 'The Brotherhoods have investigated many other reports of people being turned to stone, and they all proved false.'
'Ah, I don't know, I don't know,' Maram muttered. 'Perhaps there's another pass that Graybuck is unaware of.'
We all looked at Berkuar as he rubbed at his heavily bearded jaw then spat into the fire. He said, 'Graybuck is right: there are no passes through the mountains other than the gap.'
Maram gazed at Berkuar and asked, 'Are you sure?'
'As sure as you are of your nose on your fat face.'
'Ah,' Maram said, 'you know this country well, don't you? What is your belief about this Stonemaker?'
'I've never gone into the gap, so I can't say truly,' Berkuar told us. 'But my grandfather once saw something at the mouth of the gap that might have been a man of stone - he came within a quarter mile of it before he turned away.'
Master Juwain offered his opinion that this was likely some natural rock configuration or even a stone carving that the ancients had made. He restated his desire to explore this mystery.
'I know the way to the gap,' Berkuar told us. 'I'll take you there, if that is what you decide.'
He turned to look at me then, and so did Master Juwain and Maram. I drew my sword and watched as the silustria glowed glorre when I pointed it toward the west. I said, 'Surely Master
Juwain is right that this Yaga is only a legend. But even if he's wrong, I'd rather venture through the gap than fight our way south. I'm tired of killing.'
Atara and Liljana agreed with this, and so did Kane, and even the children. Finally, Maram bowed his head to the consensus of our company and groaned out, 'Well, we survived the damn Stonefaces and so I suppose we can slip past this
Stonemaker,
whatever it really is. But I have a bad feeling about this.'
In the morning we said our farewells to Graybuck and his family and set out again toward the mountains. For the first few miles we bushwacked through a wood thick with buckthorn, sumac and many flowers. Then we came to a road that led north and slightly west. For the rest of the day, as the ground rose before us, we slowly rode up this deserted road through an archway of great elms, oaks and sycamores. We passed an old woodcutter and a couple of hunters, but saw no sign of the Dragon's men or any other people. We made camp that night on the bank of a stream that cut the road. For dinner that night we ate part of a boar that Berkuar had killed. Maram downed nearly an entire ham by himself. It was astonishing how much my friend could eat when one of his hungers came upon him.
The morning found us working our way up along the stream. The ground rose ever higher and grew rockier, as well. The tall trees mostly blocked our view of the mountains, but we could almost smell the snow and ice of these great peaks in the cooling and freshening of the wind that blew down from them. At last we came to a granite mantle of ground where only a few shrubs and a single black locust grew out of the cracks in the rock. We stood beside the rushing stream looking at the wall of mountains before us; they were so close it seemed that we should be able to reach out and touch them.
'There's the gap,' Berkuar said, pointing at a place where the mountains' contour seemed broken in two. 'The stream leads up into it.'
'What's its name, then?' Maram asked him.
'It has none that I know,' Berkuar said.
'Then I shall name it the Kul Kharand,' Maram said. 'Unless anyone objects?'
I smiled at this because
kharand
was the ancient Ardik word meaning the fulfillment of one's dreams. I loved Maram for fighting so hard to remain hopeful.
It took us two more hours to climb up to the Kul Kharand. We walked our horses along the stony north bank of the stream. Then iron-shod hooves rang out against hard granite. If anyone guarded this pass, I thought, they would hear us coming a mile away.
At last we came out into a great bowl of stone-strewn ground where the trees grew thin and far between. Berkuar was the first of us to espy the statue set there, sculpted with his arm lifted and his hand cupped back toward the gap as if beckoning travellers toward it.
'That must have been the man that your grandfather saw,' Maram said to Berkuar.
He did not add what his rigid face said so plainly: that Berkuar's grandfather had possessed the good sense to refuse the statue's invitation.
We advanced toward the statue under the cover of Kane and Berkuar, who stalked up the rocky slope gripping strung bows nocked with arrows. It was a statue in smooth stone of a young man of medium height, rendered naked, with exquisitely fine muscles carved about a slender frame. A smile almost as lovely as Alphanderry's graced the features of the statue's face which was wonderfully expressive and lifelike.
'Remarkable,' Master Juwain said, examining the statue. He held out his hand toward it. 'Truly remarkable work.'
The stone was unusual, as dark as obsidian and as smooth as marble, with strange reddish striations running along its grain.
'Look,' he said, 'not a chisel mark upon it!'
'Is that supposed to encourage me?' Maram asked him.
'Only the ancients could have made such a sculpture,' Master Juwain declared.
'I don't know,' Berkuar said, spitting a gout of red barbark juice toward the base of the statue. 'It could be possible.'
'Yes, it
could
be,' Maram said. 'But there's another possibility, isn't there?'
'Your stonemaking Yaga?' Master Juwain asked him.
'Yes,
my
Yaga, if you want to call it that. Do you remember Ymiru's purple gelstei? What if this Yaga keeps a purple gelstei and uses it to turn men into stone?'
So saying, he smacked his hand against the statue's face, and then immediately cringed back from it as if fearing that it might come to life.
'I've never heard of the purple gelstei,' Master Juwain said, 'being used this way.'
He looked toward Kane, who said, 'So, I'm not sure that it
could
be used this way.'
He paused to draw in a deep breath, and the look of relief on Maram's face instantly gave way to dread as Kane added: 'But neither am I sure that it could not.'
'No one seems sure of anything,' Maram muttered. 'Well,
I
am sure of one thing: I should never have left Mesh. I should have married Behira, I know I should have. Then I might have, ah, feasted on roasted boar and drunk the sweetest of brandy in contentment to the end of my days, few though they might have been. If ever I'm to return to my beloved's arms, I think we'd better find another way through these mountains.'
Kane, at last, had heard enough of Maram's worries and complaints. He pointed past the statue into the gap and growled out,
'This
is our way! You'll find your beloved, whoever she is, wherever she is, through here!'
At this, Atara stood by her horse orienting her face toward the gap. A coldness seemed to strike into her heart and spread out into her limbs.
I walked over and placed my hand on her cheek, gently turning her toward me. I asked her, 'What do you see in this gap?'
And she told me, 'I see nothing - nothing at all, now.'
'But you're afraid to go into it?'
'I'm afraid to go into it,' she admitted. 'But then I'm afraid to go into the south, east or north, too. There is darkness in all directions.'
It was a scryer's answer, a useless answer, and I ground my teeth in frustration. Then I drew my sword. When I raised it past the statue toward the gap it glowed a bright glorre.
'We'll go on then,' I announced. I turned to Berkuar and said, 'You've guided this far, at great cost, and we owe you great thanks. But the ground ahead of you will be as unfamiliar to you as it will be to us. We should say farewell.'
'What? And leave you to the Yaga?'
No argument that I could fashion was enough to persuade Berkuar to part company with us. He hadn't deserted us in the Skadarak, he said, and he certainly wasn't about to turn tail now.