Mira frowned. “Who were the Greeks? And the Confucians? What is Chinese? What is a civil service?”
“One question at a time,” Gar said with a smile that would have been a laugh in another man. He began to explain. When he ran out of breath, Alea took over, then Gar again, then Alea.
Blaize listened, dazed, as Mira asked question after question. He was amazed at the panorama of marvels that Gar and Alea opened before him, but amazed even more by the quickness of Mira’s intelligence. Strangely, it made her seem even more attractive. That’s wrong, he thought. Only people’s hearts and looks should make them attractive. Nonetheless, he couldn’t deny that his pulse beat faster with each question Mira asked, each incisive comment she made.
At last Alea turned to him and asked, “Don’t you have any questions, Blaize?”
“Well, yes,” he said, still feeling dazed. “What is this Dowism you mentioned?”
“Taoism,” Gar corrected, softening the dental sound and emphasizing the dipthong. Blaize frowned, noticing the subtle difference in the sound of the word. Gar explained, “The Tao is the harmony and unity of everything that exists. If we can understand how it all fits together and find our places in that great grand Unity, we’ll be happier in this life and become even more a part of it after we die.”
Blaize frowned. “Is that like Heaven?”
“In a way,” Gar said, “a way of living forever. You might not be aware of it as yourself, though.”
“Then again, you might,” Alea said, “but you’d realize that what you’d thought of as ‘Blaize’ was really just a small part of everything you really are.”
“So it’s a matter of trying to discover everything you can become?” Mira asked.
“That’s part of it,” Alea said warily.
A thrill passed through Blaize’s whole body. She understood so quickly! Too quickly, more quickly than he—he wasn’t good enough for her. Of course, that didn’t matter, since she had come to hate him as soon as she’d learned he was an apprentice magician.
Still, it wasn’t long before Gar threw up his hands in surrender and Alea said, “You’ve come to the limit of what we know, Mira. We’ll quickly learn more though, I promise you. I think that before we start studying, you’d better find us a mountaintop where we can be sure of some peace.”
The mountains weren’t hard to find—they towered in the distance. The companions spent the day hiking toward them, sometimes in silence, sometimes with Alea talking to Mira or Gar. Blaize felt rather left out but reminded himself how lucky he was to have any company at all. Now and again, though, Gar and Alea would teach them a song, and they would all march singing, “I’ll build me a desrick on Yandro…” though Blaize had no idea what a desrick was or where Yandro might be. From the look on Mira’s face, he doubted that she did, either.
The next morning, he woke to find Gar and Alea taking turns reading passages from a book while the tea water heated and the journeybread fried. The book, as it turned out, was the Tao Te Ching, which Gar told him meant The Book of the Way of Virtue. After breakfast they hiked up into the foothills. Over the midday meal they read more of the book, then discussed it as they climbed into the mountains. Soon the way grew too steep for talking, but when they pitched camp, Alea sat reading the book while Gar showed the younger folk how to pitch camp, light a campfire, and prepare a meal. The next morning, Alea supervised the camp while Gar read—a different book this time, by someone named Chang Tzu.
After four days, they had finally come near enough to the mountaintop so that Gar and Alea were willing to make a more or less permanent camp—but by this time, they were so deeply involved in discussing the ideas in the books that they left pitching camp to Blaize and Mira. That meant the two of them had to talk to each other, at least to the extent of “Fetch a bucket of water, will you?” or “Do you think these pine boughs are thick enough for a bed?” or even, “Here, let me try—I’ve always been good with flint and steel.”
“Of course,” Mira said with scorn, “you’re a magician, aren’t you?”
Blaize looked up in surprise, trying to conceal his hurt—he’d had a good deal of practice at that lately. “I’m not that kind of magician.” He turned back to the pile of kindling and struck a spark into the dried moss. “Not apt to become any kind of magician now.”
“Oh, you seem to deal well enough with ghosts.”
“Well enough for what?” Blaize watched the moss catch and breathed on it until a little flame licked upward; then he dropped on some wood shavings and watched the flame grow until he could add kindling. As the little fire blossomed, he said, “I’ll be able to call for help, yes, if the nearby ghosts are kind, but if we run into anything mean, I doubt I’ll be able to talk it into leaving us alone.”
“Don’t worry, Alea can.” Mira watched him wince with a certain satisfaction. “Maybe she can teach you how to drive away spirits.”
“I’ve asked,” Blaize said glumly. “All she could tell me was that she let them feel the force of her anger.”
“Well, it worked. What’s the matter? Can’t you get angry?”
“Of course,” Blaize said, surprised. “I just don’t seem to be able to aim it the way she does.”
“Well, maybe thinking of them as parts of the Tao will help,” Mira said with a touch of sarcasm.
Blaize’s gaze leaped up to hers. “Why, what a marvelous idea! Perhaps I can learn to be a magician, after all.”
He turned back to the fire and the glow in his face wasn’t just the reflection of the flames. With a sinking heart, Mira wondered what she had started.
She told herself she didn’t need to worry, that Gar and Alea weren’t really magicians, or at least, not the same kind as the lords, nowhere nearly as powerful. She managed to keep believing that until dinner was done, the plates and pot scrubbed and packed, and Gar sat down cross-legged some distance from the fire, back ramrod straight, though his whole body seemed relaxed. He set his hands on his knees and tilted his head up slightly, staring at the profusion of stars. This high on the mountain, what few trees there were, were low and scrawny, so the sky spread above them in a vast panorama, stars strewn across it like powder. Mira sneaked peeks at Gar watching the heavens as she lay down to sleep, but there was something about him that set her on edge, even though at last he closed his eyes. She nudged Alea and asked, “Does he sleep sitting up?”
“No,” Alea told her. “He is trying to read his brother’s mind.” Mira looked up at her, suddenly wary. “Where is his brother?” Alea turned and pointed up into the northwest sky. “There.”
7
Mira stared at the sky, feeling a prickle of dread running down her spine. She forced words through stiff lips. “How can he read a mind so distant when he is doing nothing?”
“His body may be doing nothing,” Alea explained, “but his mind is very active. He is meditating.”
“What is that?”
Blaize propped himself up on an elbow to listen. “Meditating means freeing your mind to explore with sharpened focus,” Alea explained. “You see connections in the world that our waking mind does not. In his case, the world he can’t see is his homeland, halfway across the galaxy.”
Mira frowned. “What is ‘the galaxy’?”
“All that.” Alea swept a hand across the heavens. “All the stars you can see, and a great many more besides. Do you see those two that seem to be almost joined?”
“The Twins? Of course,” Mira said. “Everyone knows of them.”