Grandmaster (15 page)

Justin had grown into a nearly perfect specimen of young manhood. The scars where he had carried the heavy weights had disappeared, and his skin was bronzed and hardened from his years spent in the rugged mountain climate. The boy's stick-thin limbs had filled out with muscle.

When he moved, it was with the grace of a tiger. He had learned how to walk without disturbing even the dry leaves underfoot. He could endure a degree of pain that even the disciplined monks of Rashimpur found astonishing. He exercised for weeks on end without sleep or food. He had grown tall, more than a foot taller than most of the monks at Rashimpur. During devotions, he towered above them, his electric blue eyes surveying all he saw with detached grandeur.

"Your body has grown well," Tagore said.

"I have done my best." A small spark flashed in his blue eyes. His teacher had never complimented him before.

Tagore became an old man. The crinkles around his eyes and mouth had deepened into furrows, and the skin over his beak nose was stretched and spotted. Justin had always thought of Tagore as a big man, the greatest and strongest of all the remarkable men at Rashimpur. Now he looked at him as a man would regard an equal, and he noticed for the first time that his teacher was just barely taller than the other monks, his small bones as fragile as a bird's.

Tagore smiled with his eyes. "You have done your best," he said softly.

"Yes..." He was puzzled. "And you, too, Tagore," he added. "Your training has given me everything."

"Ah," Tagore said. "And with my training and your body you are prepared to rule over Rashimpur?"

Justin's face broke into a sudden smile. "Yes," he said, exultant. "I did not want to announce myself ready for the task, but yes, I am ready."

"And for what reasons do you feel you are adequately prepared for this task?"

Justin stammered. "I—I don't understand. I'm the strongest of all the monks of Rashimpur. I have trained all my life to be the Wearer of the Blue Hat. And I wear the amulet of Patanjali. It is my destiny to rule. I am grown now. It is time. You have said so yourself."

"I said only that your body has grown well. You have learned next to nothing about your soul."

"That's not fair," Justin said. "I practice my devotions longer than any. I have carried through the Nine Steps of Renunciation. I have learned all of the eighty-four positions of the Asana, and even the longest mantras. I have been the best
chela
in every exercise of the spirit. The monks themselves have acknowledged my ability."

Tagore sat silently for several moments. "My son, a
chela
is a pupil only. The Wearer of the Blue Hat does not look to others for proof of his merit. He must know in his own heart of his place."

"But I am the best," Justin protested. "I do know it."

"Is that why you chose to smash the rock sealing the cave rather than to wait inside for us?"

Justin's frown disappeared. "I knew it was time. I wanted to prove that I could leave of my own will."

Tagore spoke quietly, his voice full of sadness. "Was it so difficult for you to wait, unnoticed, in silence?" he asked.

Justin didn't answer.

"Come."

They walked through the Great Hall to the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms. Tagore stood before it, his shoulders stooped with age. "Do you remember when the holy ones came to see you by this tree?" he asked.

"Of course," Justin said.

"Was it painful when I scraped your hand along the bark?"

Justin smiled. "Yes," he said. "At that time, I thought it was the worst pain in the world. In my dreams, this tree possessed a bark of iron."

"But you are much stronger now," Tagore said.

"I hope so," Justin said lightly.

Tagore raised his hawklike head. "Very well, my son. Pass your hand along the bark once more."

Justin looked from his teacher to the massive tree. "I don't want to damage it," he said.

"The Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms cannot be destroyed. Ever. Even by one so prideful as you." There was the faintest trace of anger in his voice.

Justin nodded curtly. He raised his hand as high as he could reach and grasped the bark of the tree. Then, with all his strength, he swept his hand downward.

The pain was as hideous as he remembered. Like metal spikes, the bark of the tree speared and cut the palm of his hand to bleeding strings. Blood poured out of him.

Justin gasped once with the white-hot shock that seared through him, but he quickly brought himself under control. This was, he reasoned, Tagore's final test for him. If he could endure this pain, he could endure anything. He would be ready. He closed his eyes. Slowly his blood vessels contracted. The bleeding stopped. He willed his throbbing nerves to silence, and the pain subsided to a dull thumping. At last, he was prepared to face Tagore.

"There is no more pain," he said proudly. Tagore said nothing. Justin plucked a leaf from the tree. "May I heal it now?" he asked.

"If you are the one who heals your wounds, yes," Tagore said.

Justin grasped the leaf with his wounded hand.

He screamed.

The touch of the leaf was like fire. He dropped the leaf and it fell, blood-soaked, to the floor. The throbbing pain had returned, greater than before. Justin tried to will it into submission, but the pain raged unabated.

Tears sprang to his eyes. "It's terrible," he groaned, pleading with his eyes. "I can't stand it."

"You can," Tagore said coldly. "And you will. And one day perhaps you will understand where a man's strength lies."

He turned his back and walked away.

The next day Justin sought out the old teacher. His hand was wrapped in cloth, and there was no pride in the blue eyes. "Please help me to understand," he said.

Tagore gave him a roll of coarse rice paper. "Kneel before the tree and crumple this paper into a ball," he said.

Justin looked up. "And then?"

"And then smooth the paper flat. When you have finished, begin again, crumpling the paper and smoothing it on the floor of the Great Hall. You are not to speak during the task. You are not to move from your place. You are not to come to me again. Go."

Trembling with anger and shame, Justin took the rice paper to the Great Hall and knelt before the Tree of the Thousand Wisdoms. From his position on the floor, the tree looked once again as it had when he was a boy, forbidding, darkly grand. The tree where the spirit of Brahma lived.

As Tagore had instructed, he crumpled the paper into a ball and then smoothed it flat on the stone floor. It was no effort. It did not even pain his damaged hand. The exercise required no skill, no strength, no endurance. As the monks passed, unseeing, in front of him to gather for devotions, he flushed with humiliation. Those others were to bow to
him,
he thought angrily. They always had. It was not his place to stay on his knees in full view of his followers, performing a task unfit for the lowliest
chela.
He was Patanjali. He was the Wearer of the Blue Hat.

Tagore walked by him without a glance. The old man has lost his senses, he thought, hating the stooped figure who shuffled down the long hall. Justin began to rise. There would be a confrontation, and it would be now.

The moment his knees left the ground, the old man whirled around and fixed him with a stare so cold and unforgiving that it felt like a dagger entering Justin's heart. Involuntarily, he sank to the floor again.

The old man was a magician. A mind reader. An evil, fanatical old lunatic.

Who had given him the body of a god.

Stifling his rage, he crumpled the paper again.

The sun set and rose again. And set. Food was brought to him once a day. He ate alone, in silence, kneeling in the Great Hall. At night, one of the monks took him to his cell, now cleared of the spiky rocks, and Justin lay down on the bare stone floor, trying to hold back his tears of shame. Autumn gave way to winter, and when the small doorway to the hall opened, gusts of windblown snow showered the torches like sparks. In spring, he heard the songs of birds outside as he knelt in his small spot, crumpling and smoothing the rolls of paper that were brought to him every few days.

Another year passed. He would never be strong again, he was sure. Tagore had given him the useless task to perform in order to take away his strength—the strength he had spent a lifetime of discipline acquiring.

To counteract his failing muscles, he began to use the time in his cell at night to exercise. Alone, fighting off sleep, he breathed and stretched, working one muscle against the other. He worked a crack in the wall until a small rock broke loose. With this he chipped away at the wall, night after night. After a few months he had loosened a section of rock and broken it into small pieces, which he knotted into his robes. Using the weights as he had as a child, he performed his exercises, teaching himself how to move again. Now, when sleep came, Justin welcomed it.

He grew accustomed to silence. Each morning he focused all his attention on the short walk from his cell. His legs fairly danced with the pleasure of walking. Kneeling before the ever-present paper, he began to observe details of the tree that he had never before noticed. Minute pockets of sap formed on the bark during the autumn season; in spring, the blackish trunk took on subtle shades of green. He grew to tell the time of day by the shades of light and dark cast by shadows in the hall. Each grain of rice he ate became a new experience for him, and for the first time he tasted a variety of flavors in the food he had once regarded as bland. He felt the response of his organs to every breath he took, every miniscule shiver of excitement.

Gradually his world, which he had thought was shrunken into one odious task, had exploded into a thousand universes, each bursting with experience. Suddenly, he found that there was barely enough time in each day to sift through all the wonders that entered his mind. The world was not Rashimpur. It was immense. And it was tiny. He meant nothing to it. And everything.

As he was smoothing out his paper, one of the monks bade Justin to follow him outside. The beauty of the sunset that melted around Amne Xachim was achingly beautiful. His nostrils filled with the cold air, and he shivered with its sweetness. His mind reeled with the thousands of sounds and songs of the mountains, all filled with breathtaking wonder. He stood on the edge of the cliff where he had stood on the day of his coronation. Once again, he felt power surge through him as it had never done since. He touched the amulet on his chest, and again he heard the ancient music he had heard on the day he met Tagore. It had been mysterious then, unknowable. But now he heard it, and knew distinctly what the music was. It was the sound of the wind, of the birds, of the still water in the lake, of the movement of the earth and its births and deaths. It was the sound of present and past and eternity. It was being. It was life.

This time he did not stop the tears that came to his eyes. Never had he thought he would see anything so lovely, hear anything so beautiful, and yet the sights and sounds that intoxicated him were things he had seen all his life. Tagore had been right. It was all magic, every molecule of air.

Another figure walked silently to the cliffside and stood beside Justin.

"Come inside," the old man said.

In the Great Hall, Justin slipped wordlessly to his place on the floor, but Tagore took his hand and raised him up.

"Pull your hand down the bark of the tree," he said.

Justin obeyed without hesitation. The pain would come, but it would leave. The tree would wound him, but that wound would heal. And even during the worst of the pain, he knew, the wind outside would still sing. The sun would still set. Amne Xachim would continue to live, and so would his immortal soul. He feared nothing.

With all his strength he pressed against the black bark of the tree, seeing its tiny sap tears with his new eyes, savoring its thousand hidden colors, feeling its ancient strength beneath his hand. In his mind, he joined with the tree, became the tree itself. In one swift motion, he swept his bare palm down the bark.

The bark fell in a strip at his feet.

Aghast, he stared at the peeled-away bark and at the white stripe that ran the length of the tree. He looked at his hand. There was not a mark on it.

He turned to Tagore. The old man was kneeling on the hard stone floor, bowing to him. Justin reached down and helped the old man to his feet.

"Do you remember?" Tagore asked gently. "When I first brought you here? You wanted magic. To show it to you, I placed a rock in a stream."

"I remember," Justin said. They were the first words he had spoken in three years.

"Which is stronger?" Tagore asked, lifting the crumpled sheet of paper from the floor. "The rock or the water?"

Justin knelt and bowed to him.

By the time Justin Gilead was twenty-six years old, he had learned every lesson but one.

In that year, he learned how to kill.

 

 

T
he dreams had grown worse.

Through each step of Justin's development, the strange yet familiar face of the man he had come to know as the Prince of Death had entered Justin's world as he slept, bringing with him the destruction of Justin's life. He told Tagore about the dreams, of the fire and destruction he saw, of his own death and burial. But Tagore told him only that the will of Brahma would prevail and that dreams were only dreams.

"But I've seen other things. The tree. I knew about the Wearer of the Blue Hat. You believed me then."

"Yes," Tagore had said, and dismissed him.

But the old man had taken the diamond left to Justin and buried it deep within the walls of the Great Hall of Rashimpur. "This is yours," he said. "If you leave this place, you must take the diamond with you. Break it into small pieces and sell them. The diamond will keep you until you are able to return here."

Justin watched sadly as the old monk sealed the stone into the wall. "My dreams are true, aren't they," he said.

"I do not know. Only the Wearer of the Blue Hat can know."