The Red Queen (72 page)

‘They can have had no imagination, for it must be obvious to a child that someone would make a mistake, or a wrong move and that would be the beginning of it, or the end of it,’ Ana said. ‘You know Fian once told me the Beforetimers called that gathering of weapons a race, as if it were some sort of game.’

‘Madness,’ Swallow said.

I wondered if she was right about the Beforetimers having no imaginations. Maybe part of their fear came from having too much imagination. The day passed away in a strange combination of monotony and horror, with the glide frequently going east or west for a time, and once south for a little when there was no safe way forward. Occasionally there were astonishing or pitiful remnants of the lost world. Once we saw what seemed to be a giant statue of a bear and another time there was an enormous golden man, lying down, its smiling face half broken away. But mostly there was only flat black land riven by cracks or rising up into rubbled humps, and the occasional spurt of smoke or fire. There was little to do but occasionally prepare and eat food, sleep, talk and watch. Time hung strangely heavy, as it did on a sea journey when you were not shipfolk.

Gavyn finally moved, and then, somewhat alarmingly, he discovered the transparent part of the hull, and spent a good bit of time lying on it gazing down. Once he vanished and after a brief search, Dragon found him with the wolves. Rasial stayed by him, always, and I wondered how Gobor felt about that, given the wolves saw the merging of their spirits as wrong. Rheagor and the other wolves accepted them only because they had come to believe Gavyn and Rasial were as they were in order to serve my quest, but Gobor had not been with us when Gavyn saved us in the
graag
. Of course the other wolves might have told him, and the old wolf had been there when Gavyn stopped the
rhenlings
attacking the horses and the last few wolves. In any case, there was no confrontation.

Ana and Swallow spent a good deal of time sitting together, talking softly about their lives, occasionally reaching out to touch one another in a tender, tentative way, and once I saw Swallow suddenly gather Ana into his arms and kiss her passionately in a way that made me ache. Darga was never far from Ana, either, and when Swallow went down to groom and talk to Sendari for a time, she often put her arms around the enormous ugly dog and sat with him. Seeing them thus always made me sad for Jik, whom the Herder dog had chosen to forget.

Dameon, Dragon and I all spent time down with the horses, aside from cleaning the hold and scooping manure into a waste bin, we were conscious that they were in a dark cramped chamber lacking sunlight or fresh air. But at least the food had so far held out and there was plenty of water. I was somewhat comforted by the fact that Gahltha and Faraf were clearly bonding. Dragon told me, grinning, that she had asked Sendari using signal language if he did not mind their excluding him, and he had said calmly that he had the mating heat of his rider to alleviate boredom. We agreed that we did not need to mention this to Swallow or Ana.

I finished looking through Hannah’s things, but as Ana had warned me, there were little enough of them and nothing concerning my journey save some scribed notes which seemed oddly familiar until I realised they were words I had read in Jacob’s journal. Of course I had given it to Ahmedri to return to Garth, so I could not be sure, and yet I
was
sure. Obviously Hannah must have copied them. That meant she had finally found a way to get to Obernewtyn, and had read the journal and made her notes. She must have foreseen that I would have it and so left it where it was. Or she had dreamed of
me
looking at the book, and made her notes from her dream.

There were other things in the bundle that, while they had no bearing on my journey, gave me pause. A child’s tooth and a strand of silky golden hair, darker blonde and white blonde, neatly plaited together, and a little laboriously carved knife handle that had obviously been carved by someone taught by Cassy, a child, most like. The most unexpected thing was a narrow Beforetime book sealed in plast, which I had seen before. It was the little book that Cassy had gifted Doktaruth in one of my Beforetime dreams and my skin rose into gooseflesh at the sight of it. I wondered very much how Hannah had come to have it, for while it might be precious enough for Cassy to have brought it with her from Hegate, a memento of a woman she had regarded as a friend, surely she would have kept it rather than giving it to Hannah to take away when she left Stonehill.

‘There would be a story in it, if the book could speak,’ Dameon said, for he had joined me as I looked through the last of the bundle. I gave him the objects to hold, to see if his empathy could find any trace of emotions on them, for he had told me that sometimes emotions left a sort of impression on things that lasted an impossibly long time, especially if the things had belonged to a single person for years, and were handled often and valued by them. The hair was from children, but Dameon said he could feel regret and sorrow holding them, and he thought they were Hannah’s feelings rather than the child’s. The tooth came from a child, who had been passionate and demanding. There were also two book cubes that gave off a number of emotions but there was no way to know how to read them.

I put the objects away, thinking they were all interesting but had no real bearing on my quest. But Dameon said, ‘I often think of the life objects have aside from the life they have with the humans who made or used them. Take Sentinel for instance. It is a made thing and yet if it were woken it would have a kind of intelligence, even as God and Hendon and Ines do, and from all that has been said, it is an intelligence that can develop and grow.’

‘It is an intelligence that must never be wakened,’ I said.

At last, night came and the inside of the glide glowed softly to life. Swallow asked Ana to bring out the map God had made and we spread it on the table in the little eating chamber and studied it.

‘I believe Hendon is taking us to the Red Land,’ he said without preamble. ‘No matter how many twists and turns our course today has taken, we have always come back to travelling north.’ He ran a finger along the map north from Northport and all the way up and across the narrow strait that ran between the land mass we were on and the next, then he tapped this decisively, saying, ‘The Red Land.’

‘First we do not know if that
is
the Red Land or even a landmass containing the Red Land,’ I said.

‘It has to be!’ Swallow cut me off. ‘If that is the Spit sticking out there, that says the Clouded Sea and we know that ships sailed from the Spit across the Clouded Sea to reach the Red Land. So the harbour entrance to it must be somewhere along the west coast here. It has to be on this landmass because there is nothing else but it at the top of the map!’

‘You may well be right about it being the Red Land,’ I said. ‘But if we were going there we would be angling slightly north-west,’ I said. ‘And we have no idea how far we are to be taken north. This land at the top of the map runs off the edges. It may be vast, or we may simply overfly it to reach the land where Eden stands, or once stood.’

I was slightly puzzled over why he was bringing this up now, when our destination was not up to either of us. Then I remembered he had always believed we would find Sentinel in the Red Land, because of his visions of standing with me where the ancient promises had been made by Cassy to the first Red Queen. Yet he had since conceded that the ancient promises of the Twentyfamilies might have first been spoken at Inva between Cassy and Hannah and the Beforetime Misfits as a kind of resolve, long before they had been spoken in the Red Land; or they might even have been forged by Cassandra and Hannah and the Beforetime Misfits somewhere along the way to the Red Land. So that might be where we were bound.

We studied the map for a time in silence.

Ana pointed to the narrow strait between the two landmasses. ‘This could be the Andol Sea Kelver Rhonin referred to, and we are certainly going to pass over it if we continue as we have been doing. That means the land on the other side might be where we will find Sentinel and Eden.’

‘It might,’ I said grudgingly, at last.

‘Wasn’t there a name God or maybe Kelver Rhonin gave the land where Eden is?’ Ana wondered. I thought she was right but I could not recall it. I promised to look through Kelver Rhonin’s papers again, for I had brought them with me.

‘Can you ask Hendon how long it will be before we come to the end of this landmass,’ Swallow asked Ana.

‘I asked already,’ she said. ‘He told me it was impossible to say because he has to go around areas where the taint is bad enough to affect us, and he does not know in advance where they will be or how much land they cover. He just has to go where the glide can safely go, until the devices in the hull tell him it is safe to resume God’s course. But he says the taint is getting worse.’

Later still, sitting alone and wakeful in the seats before the control bench gazing out at the sculptural grotesqueries of the blasted lands, stark and dreadful by the light of the new moon, I saw something that made me wonder if the dead lands were quite so dead as we had imagined: a movement both large and swift by something I could not clearly see. I mentioned it to the androne, expecting to be told nothing could live down there, but it answered chillingly, tranquilly, that some forms of insect had survived the poisons of the cataclysm, as had some beasts, by mutating and adapting. There were, it continued in a calm monotone, great slugs and a form of cockroach that grew larger than a rat, which fed on the slugs, and which would not be able to survive on untainted earth, also some sort of ground-burrowing creature that was very savage and very large. ‘God has documented them as part of its program and I am to note all mutations until my return,’ it added.

I thought of the scars borne by Ahmedri and the description Descantra had given of some creature erupting from the sand in the midst of the wolf pack. I thought too of the dreams I had seen in which Matthew and his companions had spoken of the savage howling of some dreadful mutant beast unable to leave its tainted crevasse, dangerously close to mines where slaves were sent to work.

‘Why haven’t we seen any of these mutant creatures up till now?’ I wondered. One or another of us had been looking out since the glide first flew, even deep into the night, for none of us slept sound, except Gavyn.

‘Many of the host of surviving life forms are nocturnal, for the light is much stronger and more dangerous than before the cataclysm, User Seeker,’ the androne said. ‘Some do not reveal themselves even when there is bright moonlight.’

I thought of the
rhenlings
and the Brildane, shunning the sunlight absolutely. ‘The Great White affected the sun?’ I asked. ‘How is that possible?’

‘It is not the sun but matter released into the air that, over time, affected and altered the make-up of the atmospheric mantle around the earth. It is not poisonous but it does affect the eyes of mutations, which tend to be more sensitive. Humans may also have gone through minor responsive adaptations.’

I turned to look at it. ‘You are saying that we – that humans are not as we were in the Beforetime?’

‘All that lives was changed by the cataclysm, User Seeker,’ Hendon said. ‘At the very least, the ability of humans to breed has been inhibited.’

I was still sitting there, wide awake and lost in thought, when Dragon came to sit next to me, carrying a soundly sleeping Maruman in her arms. For a time we sat in silence looking out at the blackened, destroyed land we were passing over.

‘Swallow says we must call this the Desolation, and Ana told Hendon that is the name he is to give God, if he ever returns to Midland,’ I said.

‘I wonder what will become of him and us,’ Dragon said, and her voice sounded so strange that I looked at her. Tears streamed down her face and her eyes were wide and distressed.

‘Dragon, what is it?’ I asked, dismayed.

‘I had a nightmare,’ she said.

‘That is not very surprising,’ I said dryly, gesturing at the screen.

‘It was not a dream but a true dreaming, and yet it was a nightmare,’ she said. ‘It was of Ariel. He was standing on the deck of a ship and snow was falling onto it. Beyond them I could see a land that rose up from the shore into steep mountain peaks and there were more behind them, and beyond them ever more peaks. It was a land of mountain and cloud, for the air was thick with mist and snow was falling on ice in the water. There was a small slight man with Ariel, all wrapped up in rich strange robes and his face was painted white or maybe he wore a white mask. It was hard to tell because in the dream it was dusk and he wore a hood. The white-faced man was telling Ariel that the emperor would be delighted to have a swifter and more conclusive means of victory against his ancient enemies than the great army of slaves promised by his brother, though it was hard to imagine a weapon powerful enough to replace a slave army. Ariel laughed and said he could get hold of a weapon of such potency that an emperor could rule the whole world merely by possessing it, after a suitable demonstration had been given of its potential, and was not that a worthy exchange for a slave army? It was not the fault of the Gadfians that they were unable to provide it quickly enough to meet their bargain. And in time, if the emperor desired it, he could have his slave army as well.

The white-faced man said he heard there had been trouble among the slaves in the Red Land, some sort of uprising. Was that why the bargain could not be met? Ariel said that was nothing to do with it and anyway that had come to nothing, and its leaders had been put to death. Then Ariel said it was naught to him if the emperor’s brother would not accept the slavemasters’ offer of a greater weapon. His desire was merely to be of use to the Red Land barbarians with whom he had had long and satisfactory dealings. Then he asked if it was not better for the white-faced folk to bend their honour a little rather than to destroy a people who had proven useful and doubtless would do so again. Ariel said his reward for his benevolent intervention was merely to be permitted an audience with the white-faced emperor. The man said that was impossible for it was forbidden for anyone not born in the Hidden Land to go there, and the emperor never left his palace, which was at the heart of his kingdom on the highest mountain. But he promised to speak to the brother of the emperor to see if he would accept a powerful and deadly weapon as a replacement for the slave army he had ordered. Then Ariel laughed. That was what woke me. I always hated his laugh.’