The Red Queen (130 page)

‘Then let us not say goodbye,’ said Dameon softly. ‘Maryon always said that no one can be truly sure what the future holds.’

‘Dragon . . .’

‘Hush. I will speak to her and explain. To Matthew, too. They will understand.’

I kissed him and embraced him as best I could, holding Maruman. Rushton embraced the empath, too, long and hard, and there were tears on his face. I left them to say some final words to each other in privacy. Faraf nuzzled me and beastspoke her farewell, saying she would stay with Dameon. I was glad for his sake, and glad too, when Darga and Sendari chose to remain with Ana.

I looked after Sentinel to see she was moving away at the same swift, smooth pace, even as Merret came to say goodbye. Then Rushton mounted up and reached out a hand to haul me up behind him. Before I could take it, there was a wild commotion and people began to shout and call out.

I turned to see the Red Queen riding up on a wild-eyed muliki. She leapt from it, losing an embroidered red slipper then kicking off the other and holding up her red gown. Barefoot she came running to me, her beautiful fiery hair streaming behind her, shedding its jewelled pins. She flung her arms about my neck and near strangled me with the strength of her embrace. I held her tight and kissed her hair and felt her trembling in my arms. She was very small, and when she lifted her face to me, I kissed her hot, tear-stained, passionate face and looked into her blue eyes.

‘Brydda said that Merret said you were leaving,’ she gasped. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Little sister, there is no time for me to explain. Dameon and Ana will tell you all that matters. Save this. I am sorriest of all to leave you,’ I told her. ‘I have loved you so much and in these last few days especially, I have been so very proud of you. But now you are a queen and a queen must be brave above all things.’

She burst into wild sobs and pressed her face to mine and kissed me, and then I felt her draw a deep breath and gather herself. She stepped back then, out of my arms. ‘I will be brave and I will be a good queen, I swear it. Only, I wish you had seen me raise the sceptre.’

‘I do not need to see it any more than Jakoby did, Queen Dragon.’ I kissed her again, but very formally, and she caught up a red jewel from her hair and pressed it into my hand.

‘Remember me,’ she whispered.

I mounted up behind Rushton, and Merret stretched up to put Maruman into my arms. I lifted him gently into my coat, belted it to keep him safe, and said goodbye to her. I took one last look at Dragon and Ana and Merret, and saw Matthew running desperately towards us, even as Gahltha leapt away. I held tight to Rushton as we cantered across the broken plain, the rifts still visible, though it was dusk and soon the sun would set.

‘Elspeth!’ Matthew farsent.

‘Farewell, my dear,’ I farsent him. ‘I am sorry I could not say a long and proper farewell, but I think it would never be long enough to make our parting easy. Merret and Dameon will explain everything that can be explained. Or Ana. Take care of Dragon. Be happy. Perhaps we will meet in our dreams.’

He stayed with me for a time, and I said many of the things I had wanted to say to him, but in the end he slipped from my mind, leaving me with a final glimpse of the world through his eyes; of Dragon, straightening her back as she walked back towards Redport, alone.

When it was dark, Sentinel used Hendon’s headlight, so that we did not have to dismount. I tried to ask her why she had insisted on us going at once, but she did not respond. Finally I asked Gahltha to question her.

‘She will not hear,’ Gahltha said. ‘She is thinking.’

That was astonishing enough to silence me for a time, and when I told Rushton he said he supposed such a creature might have much to think about. I wondered at his calmness, but then I relaxed against his back and thought it might have something to do with his ability to live in the present, as beasts did.

I looked down at Brunt, prancing along beside us, seemingly tireless, and then around at the other beasts that had come with us – muliki and cats and all manner of small beasts, and even the queer little dog, Usha. And I wondered how they had known to come. Had they dreamed, too? And how was it that Swallow had come to Ana and Sendari? There was no answer to be had for gnawing at the question, and no one to ask.

We rode on through the dark night, silent with our own thoughts, but when the thin moon rose, I asked Rushton what he was thinking, wondering if he was regretting his choice, but he only looked back at me and smiled, saying he had been thinking about water because he was thirsty and my memory had not shown him many sources of it in this direction.

‘On the other hand, I have the feeling Sentinel is likely to prove resourceful,’ he added, then he looked forward and I felt his whole body go rigid.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Listen,’ he said.

I listened and was about to say I could hear nothing, when I heard it – a low soft rumbling as if Maruman purred, but a Maruman a thousand times the size of a cat.

Without warning the androne began to run in a strange rigid but fluid way, even as the dogs and muliki and the motley herd of other domestic beasts strung out behind us began to run, too. It reminded me of Rasial’s arrival at Obernewtyn.

Gahltha broke into a trot and then a canter. It was only possible because of Hendon’s headlight, revealing the broken ground before us. Even so it was precarious because of the way powdery red dust collected in depressions.

Then the ground shuddered and shuddered again, and suddenly I thought of Maruman’s words about the earth opening and spitting tongues of fire. Then the ground bucked, a monstrous movement as if the earth itself had shrugged, and I flew into the air, into utter darkness, Sentinel’s light extinguished. Nothing broke when I landed, and Maruman was nearby, jarred but safe, but I had lost hold of Rushton, who had also been thrown off, and what of Gahltha?

I tried to get up but the ground was tilting and I fell, and then there was a low terrifying rumble of sound from
underneath
us.

I froze as the sound grew steadily in volume and then came a monstrous crack, so loud that the air seemed to shudder. I felt about me frantically and found Maruman. He was lying limp. I caught him close and cradled him, terrified for him, for all of us. There were three more such frightful cracks as if the very mountains were wrenching themselves from the earth, and still the trembling of the earth grew ever more violent until the ground began to tilt.

‘Elspeth!’ Rushton roared, anguish and desperation in his voice. I could not speak but I farsought him and he found me and held me.

Finally, the earth gave a strange shiver and was still.

Pressed against Rushton’s chest, holding Maruman’s limp form, I felt the hammer of his heart and suddenly became aware of a cacophony of beast noises. I beastspoke Gahltha and found that he was unharmed but terrified.

I coughed and wondered where the stars were, then I became aware that the air was full of dust. I dragged my shirt up to cover my mouth and wrapped it around Maruman.

Then the light shone and I shielded my eyes and saw that Sentinel was standing. I gasped, for where her light shone, there was nothing but a vast black abyss.

It took two moons for us to journey from the edge of the abyss – one of the consequences of the tremendous disturbance caused by the destruction of Omega Base – to Eden, and many of the beasts who began it with us did not reach its end.

We had to remain by the great raw wound in the earth, which I had first seen illuminated by Hendon’s headlight, until dawn because Gahltha had been hurt by the fall he had taken when he had thrown Rushton and Maruman and me, though none of
us
had been hurt.

It transpired that he had injured a leg slightly in the mine collapse and that injury had been exacerbated by his journey beneath the earth with the wolves, and now by the fall. I had nothing at all with me to relieve his pain and that night I bitterly regretted that Ana had chosen not to come with us, for she might have eased him. To my astonishment and joy, Sentinel said mildly that it would have been a hard journey for the child within Ana, and if something had gone wrong, Sentinel would have had no help to offer, for the knowledge she encompassed did not contain anything at all about healing humans or beasts. She would correct that, she promised, when we reached Eden.

I had hardly taken in the rest of her words, for I was thinking about my parting from Ana, and the joy in her eyes that I had taken to be from her dream of Swallow. But maybe he had told her more than that Hendon was coming . . .

Some time later, my thoughts circled back to what Sentinel had said about Eden, and I asked why she could not simply reach out to Eden as she had done before. She reminded me that the node that had allowed her to communicate had been embedded in her hardware. I did not understand, but Rushton said he thought the node had probably been a device Marji Erlinder had put into the computermachine that had housed Sentinel, and it had been left behind when she had poured herself into Hendon. Sentinel agreed this was a simplistic but serviceable explanation of her words, and added that she would be able to form a new link, physically, once we reached Eden.

Daylight revealed the full extent of the abyss behind us, and the sight of it rendered both Rushton and me silent for a long time. The other side of the abyss was far away and the land seemed to have risen up so it was impossible to see what lay beyond. I prayed that Redport was still standing, and Sentinel assured me that the entire coastal region upon which it stood, though affected by tremors, was very stable.

There was no way to farseek across it because at the bottom of the abyss, visible as a bright hot thread, was a river of fire, which I discovered had the same blocking effect as the sea or any large body of water. Sentinel said calmly that her calculations suggested that in time the sea would flow through it, and I heard waves crashing in her voice and the hiss of fires being quenched. Then she added that she had been aware of the potential for disturbance, even as she had enabled me to shut her computermachine down.

It shocked me that she had risked herself and Gahltha, who had travelled with her to Redport to find me, but Sentinel assured me that, according to her calculations, she had known there would be time to fetch me and to return to stable ground before the land shifted. I forbore to mention that we had only
just
reached safe ground, and Gahltha had been injured. I wondered with horror if the terrible vision I had seen of wolves falling into a glowing river of fire had not been of the wolves Gobor had told me about, but a future that we had narrowly avoided in which all of us perished in the abyss.

The only thing we could give Gahltha was rest, or so I thought when I suggested that we might wait another day, but Sentinel said we were in an anthracite region and mentioned something about fire and poisonous vapours. Rushton could make no more sense of its words on this matter than I, but what
was
clear was that we could not long stay where we were.

It took us three days to reach the rift where the glide had fallen, and by then, Gahltha was limping badly and in a good deal of pain. There had been times during those days when I heard in his mind his longing for the beastheart that had called to him after the collapse of the ilthum mine.

But Maruman, restored to himself, had ridden upon Gahltha’s back, too light to trouble the black horse physically, but berating and chiding and mocking him, and sometimes coaxing him to go on. And Brunt was ever by his side or more often under his feet, leaping and rushing at his legs to butt at them and making absurd pronouncements about what he thought he could see just ahead.

Gahltha later told me that the two of them drove him mad and that sometimes it was sheer irritation that kept him going.

It was only when we reached the rift, or what remained of it, that I realised all of the ground from the escarpment to the foremost edge of the rift, had dropped to the level of the ground about Redport. This meant the damaged glide now lay before us, fully exposed, amidst a mess of rubble. The intact side of the rift upon which it had alighted now rose up as a cliff behind it, the edge of the high plain that ran back beyond it.

This was a boon because we were able to salvage much that would be vital for our journey. Rushton found a medicine box in the hold area that was suited to beasts; there was another box of healing materials, which I remembered Ana using; and though we knew nothing of the potions and powders in either, Sentinel was able to fathom the ingredients by testing them, and we could guess their use after she told us their properties, and which might have any good in them after so long. This meant I was able not only to prepare poultices for Gahltha’s leg, but to give him powders that would reduce any infection beneath the skin, and other powders that would mute the pain.

We also salvaged food for humans and beasts, water devices, bedding and clothes, and a dozen other things we would need for the journey to Eden, but not the golator, for Sentinel said she had fixed Eden’s location in her mind and did not need any other guidance.

We planned to stop a fiveday at the rift to let Gahltha rest his leg, though Sentinel had insisted we climb up to high ground before we made camp. We had to travel some way along the edge of the rift to find a place that Gahltha could manage, and still it was an agonising ascent for the black horse. But he endured, and finally, as Rushton fed all of the various beasts and gave them water, I was able to tend him.

I spent the following day changing poultices on Gahltha’s leg, gratified to discover that the swelling was going down and he was in better spirits. I arranged and rearranged supplies into bundles that could be distributed among us, and Brunt insisted on carrying a bundle. In the end the only way to stop him butting our legs in pugnacious frustration was to give in. My irritation at the nuisance of it vanished when I saw how the ridiculous little creature cheered Gahltha by prancing proudly about with its tiny burden, sometimes leaping up onto the back of one of the placid muliki.

Maruman looked down on it with disdain, dismissing Gahltha’s amusement as evidence of the inferior wit of equines.

Then, in the afternoon, Rushton came up from the glide, his face serious and uneasy. ‘Elspeth, the ground is smoking,’ he said.

I saw that he was right as soon as I went to the edge of the rift and looked out. Everywhere over the fallen plan, where there was a crack or a rift, smoke curled out to form a drifting bluish haze. The rift itself went deeper beyond the glide, and I realised smoke was rising from it as well.

The smell had a sharply unpleasant edge, and I thought with a chill of what Sentinel had said of poisonous vapours. I asked her what the smoke was coming from and she gave me a long and all but incomprehensible answer. Rushton and I worked out that there was a seam of some dense substance deep under the earth that had caught alight. This was not only heating the ground, which would eventually render it even more unstable, but the smoke was poisonous. I was not comforted by Sentinel’s assurance that we would have to breathe it for some time before being affected.

‘How long will the fire burn?’ Rushton asked her.

‘My calculations suggest it will take seven centuries for the seam to burn out naturally,’ Sentinel said.

‘What is a century?’ I asked her.

‘Ye gods, it is a Beforetime word for
a hundred years
,’ Rushton said incredulously. ‘She is saying it will burn for seven hundred years!’

I stared at Sentinel. ‘I have heard of this before,’ I remembered. ‘Hendon spoke of it. But can a fire truly burn so long?’

‘There were such fires burning in the time before the Cataclysm, which you call the Great White, Elspeth Gordie,’ Sentinel said calmly. ‘This one may burn longer than I have estimated, for it will spread under the ground and may find other fuel.’

I was aghast. ‘It will spread!’

‘Very slowly,’ Sentinel said.

When I told Gahltha he was as eager as I to leave. He ought to have rested longer, but the poultice and powders seemed to have hastened his healing. There was little to do except to dress in the sturdy Beforetime clothes and boots we had taken from the glide, loading up the beasts and shouldering our own packs. Sentinel was already loaded. We set off at dusk, and I was astonished to see Sentinel lift her head and howl; the sound was utterly eerie.

‘She is calling the Brildane,’ Gahltha sent.

An hour later, they came – Gobor One Ear and his small pack of she-wolves and young males.

‘Greetings, ElspethInnle. It seems that and these ones do come to the last part of that journey that began in the wolf vale,’ Gobor sent in his harsh mindvoice, and for the first time, there was a hint of warmth in it.

‘I thank you for saving Gahltha, and I am glad we will travel to Eden together,’ I said.

And so began the last part of the journey that, for me, had begun long ago in the gardens of Kinraide when I was a child and an orphan, sitting at the foot of a statue, watching a cat stalk a bird.

It was not an easy journey, across that hot, bare, empty flat land, now severed forever, Sentinel said, from the Red Land by the abyss that would one day form a strait through which the sea would flow, and the plain of fire. Hearing this, I understood at last why I would never be able to go back to the Land or to Obernewtyn, nor to the Red Land.

After the wolves joined us, we resumed the old pattern of walking at night, for we had to create a cover for the wolves to shield their eyes by day. We filled the hours of walking by asking questions of Sentinel, but though she told us much that was of interest or strange, often she was difficult to understand. Aside from sometimes choosing to speak in the language of some beast or other, she also lapsed into incomprehensibly complex Beforetime language, or she would speak in the strange harsh language of computers. Sometimes she would not hear me speak because she was thinking, which seemed to involve or result in the making of music. This latter she did often, according to the beasts. When I asked her about it, Sentinel answered that she was trying to understand the language of music, for it seemed to her it was another human language and might help her to solve the essential paradox of humanity.

Truly she was a mysterious being.

It was Gahltha who offered the first hint of an end to our journey, when he scented water. It turned out to be a narrow stream flowing up from a subterranean river, and we all drank from it with pleasure, save for Sentinel, who watched us for a time, and then set off again. She was impatient, I thought wonderingly, for she had told us that we would reach Eden at dawn. I was sorry that the stream did not run in the direction we went, but later we passed another stream shining silver in the light of the full moon overhead, and then I cried out in delight to see a green shoot bursting up from the red earth.

Maruman promptly padded forward and ate it!

But we found more grass growing over a low hill, at the foot of which ran another stream, and the horses and goats and muliki stopped to graze. After quenching my thirst, I climbed to the top of the hill with Rushton, where Sentinel stood gazing east, and in the distance I saw a building rising up from the flat land on the edge of a shining seam. Behind it, the sun was rising.

‘It is the sea,’ Rushton said.

‘It is an inland sea,’ Sentinel said. ‘It is Eden.’

We stopped there on the grassy hill to wait out the daylight hours, for the sake of the wolves, but Sentinel would not wait. She went on ahead, leaving us to follow.

‘I cannot help wishing Garth could know her. And Dell,’ Rushton said, as we sat together, facing Eden and our future, into which the shining form of the androne walked.

I laughed. ‘But they might! For Sentinel will link to Eden now. She told me that she is a govamen computer, or once was, so she will be able to use the Eden computer to reach out to Ines and to God. She will be able to free Tash and the Speci and heal Miryum, if she lives yet.’

Later, when the sun was near to setting, with Maruman sleeping curled in my lap, his mind spilling into mine, I watched Rushton making a little pit fire using dry grass he had collected and wound into knots for fuel, determined to boil some proper porridge with the last of the little store of real food from the glide. Seeing the flames leap and dance hungrily about the edges of the pot, I thought of the abyss and the burning plain.