The Red Queen (73 page)

I stared at her. ‘But you have never met Ariel, Dragon. He left Obernewtyn before we found you.’

‘I know him,’ she said simply. ‘I saw him often in Matthew’s nightmares and in your mind as well since we have travelled together. And once when I flew upon the dreamtrails in dragonish shape, he came and tried to lure me to him. He called me and said that I was very beautiful and powerful. I might have gone to him, if I had not recognised him,’ she said. Her blue eyes looked into my eyes, searching them. ‘Don’t you see, Elspeth? Ariel said the rebel leaders in the land had been put to death, and Matthew was one of them. That means he has been killed.’

‘We cannot assume anything of the sort,’ I said firmly. ‘You said Ariel spoke of rebel leaders. He did not name them and besides he might very well have lied. Tell me, did Matthew ever know you visited his dreams?’ I asked partly out of curiosity and partly to distract her. I knew the stupidity of torturing oneself over true dreams. If harm had come to Matthew, I would grieve when I knew it truly.

She shook her head, flushing slightly. ‘I was not prying. It happened when he was teaching me how to use my powers to defend Obernewtyn. When we slept my mind sought his and sometimes he dreamed of the past. I saw a sickly child with pale hair – a girl called Cameo – and then there was another girl called Selmar, with dark hair and bold eyes. I think Ariel killed them both, or Matthew thought he did, and he dreamed of Ariel doing it over and over, and then laughing. Once he dreamed it was me that Ariel was hurting. It was horrible.’ She hesitated. ‘I did not realise to begin with that Matthew did not know, for we were together in his dreams. We . . .’ She flushed and I could imagine what she did not say. She went on. ‘After we had driven the soldierguards away by convincing them Obernewtyn was a ruin, Matthew changed towards me. He was often cold and sometimes angry. I did not wish to invite his wrath so I did not tell him that my mind was sometimes drawn inside his dreams when we slept, even after he came to hate me, though he did not always hate me in his dreams.’ She shrugged. ‘I did not tell him because I feared he would think I pried and dislike me all the more for it.’ She sighed. ‘I was so young.’

‘He was young, too, Dragon,’ I told her gently. ‘He is a man now and long since has he repented of his cruelty. His thoughts of you now are very different from those he had when he was in the Land.’

‘Because he learned who and what I am,’ Dragon said, giving me a grave, direct look. ‘I have dreamed of him in the Red Land since my memory returned, Elspeth. I have heard him speak of the fair and valiant Red Queen who will come to save her enslaved people. But I am still the urchin girl who lived wordless and wild in the Beforetime ruins, and growled like a dog at him. I know naught of crowns and ruling, and though I am no longer a child and have learned to polish my words and manners, sometimes I still have the urge to growl or claw. Matthew admires the powerful saviour queen he has invented for the people of the Red Land and for himself, but she is not me. I am only Dragon and he made it clear how he feels about her. If he lives he will never care for me.’

‘You are who you were – we are all that – but you are also who you are now and who you will be,’ I said softly, fiercely. ‘You are Dragon through whom flows the blood of valiant queens. I saw your mother in your dream. She may have been distorted by the dream, but she was courageous and a true queen and she loved you. You are her true heir and your people await your return and set all their hopes upon it. Whether or not a man loves you does not change any of that.’

Dragon hung her head. ‘I know it. In truth it is that which troubles me most deeply, that the people of the Red Land await me with such fidelity that it has rendered them powerless. For I did not travel to the Red Land as Maryon said I would do and unless this glide stops there as Swallow believes it will, I will leave them and their troubles far behind. I wish they would choose a new queen, or even a king. If Matthew lives still, he could lead the people of the Red Land to freedom.’

I did not know what to say to her, save that Matthew would never dream of usurping her place. ‘Dragon, I believe that you will come to the Red Land once my quest is done, for did not the futuretellers see us there together?’

‘Maybe they saw no more than the dreams I have of us together there,’ Dragon said.

That silenced me, for I, too, had dreamed of us together in the Red Land. Finally, I said, ‘Perhaps the rebels have already won, and Ariel has fled to this other land and lies to gain a place there. Why else would he claim that he wanted nothing but to meet the emperor?’

‘Do you think that could be so?’ Dragon asked, yearning.

I could not lie. ‘I do not know, but the futuretellings said that if the four ships left the Land the people of the Red Land would rise against their masters, and they left as they had been commanded to do. It was we who supposed that freedom would come because you were aboard one of the ships. Neither Maryon nor the Temple overguardian said any such thing.’

‘I think they are not free,’ Dragon said after pondering it for a little. ‘When we were in Midland, I dreamed of Matthew running and hiding with Merret and Jakoby by his side, and another time I dreamed of Rushton fighting, blood streaming down his face, and Jakoby was with him, too, so they must all be together.’

I stared at her. ‘You saw them together? In the Red Land?’

‘Where else?’ she asked reasonably.

‘I don’t know, but in my last dream of Rushton, he was somewhere being hunted and I would swear he was in some sort of dense forest,’ I said. Then I frowned. ‘When the others wake, I think we must compare our dreams and try to get some sense of what is happening in the Red Land.’

‘It does not matter unless we are to go there,’ Dragon said.

‘As we may,’ I said, though her nightmare of Ariel in some distant land where snow fell gave me pause, for there was nowhere in any land I knew or had heard of where snow fell on the sea, or ice floated there as on a mountain pond. In truth I would not have known such a thing was possible, and maybe it was not, for many things could be in dreams that were not in life. What I had believed for some time was that I would have to confront the Destroyer ere the end, and that meant Ariel and I must be in the same place at the same time. As long as he had been in the Red Land, there had been the possibility that Sentinel was there or in some neighbouring land. But what if both Sentinel and Ariel were in the cold mountainous place Dragon had seen in her dream; the land of the white-faced lords from whence had come the order for a slave army, which had in turn set the Gadfian slavemasters planning to invade the Land and enslave its population – an idea that had been planted, as far as I could tell, by Ariel?

‘Only three of the four ships came to the Red Land, and one of those was attacked at sea and sunk just off the coast,’ Dameon said softly, and we both turned to see the empath sitting quietly on a long bench by the nearest side window.

‘You dreamed of it,’ I said to the empath, coming to sit by him, for there was no other way he could know such things. He looked pale and weary and I wondered if he was becoming ill.

‘I dreamed of a battle aboard one of our greatships,’ he said. ‘I could see nothing, of course, but the sound of battle is unmistakable; then I heard Reuvan shout that a black ship had fired upon the Norse ship and it was sinking. Grufyyd shouted back that they must rescue those aboard from the water, since the Red Land had no shore for them to swim to. Someone else shouted, ‘How, when there are only two ships left, both under attack and one limping badly?’ Then Jakoby – I think it was she – said that they must find a way to board the
Black Ship
, for none would set foot on the Red Land while it guarded the way.’

‘Salamander’s
Black Ship
,’ I said bitterly, and ached for the Norselanders who had surely drowned when the Norse ship sank; and for Ursa and Cinda, and the parents of Lark, who must now grieve the boy who had stowed away on the ship. And if there were only two ships other than that, then one had been lost on the journey, and most like it was the one cast up on the shore during the storm I had dreamed about before we ever came to Pellmar Quadrants.

‘Does not Ariel always travel with the raider?’ Dragon asked.

‘Not always, for Salamander is at sea constantly, and Ariel has always had residences ashore where he spent periods of time. It is possible he went to the mountainous land you saw in your dream, Dragon, on another of Salamander’s ships, leaving the slaver and his fleet to guard the way to the Red Land while he tried ostensibly to bargain for time for the Gadfians. From the glimpses I have had of it in dreams and from what I could glean from the guild dreambooks, the settlement is spread about the shores of a wide bay but that cannot be reached save through a narrow, steep-sided gap in the high cliffs through which ships can travel one at a time. Aside from that opening, all the rest of the coast of the Red Land is high impenetrable cliffs.’

‘The Talons they are called,’ Dragon said. ‘And from the other side, you see they jut out from the land either side to form a natural stone wall. Redport is all spirals of greenery and water and sometimes fire. The streets all curve around the Infinities, and our palace was on an island in the bay. There are three bridges by which it can be reached. One is wide and busy and anyone may use it to come and ask for an audience with the queen. That is called the High Walk. Carts with deliveries for the kitchen entered by this means, as did the singers and dancing troupes who came that way to perform for us. The second way is narrow and private and guarded, and it was called the Quiet Walk because it was said trouble always came that way. The third way is for beasts and is . . . was guarded by them. It is a ford, really, and rises above the water only at very low tides. Most of the time it is hidden just under the surface so that if you walk on it, it seems you walk on water. It is called the Sea Walk and it runs directly into the forest wilderness that grows all about the palace. The other two bridges lead into the palace.’

Nothing she said much resembled the stony city I had seen in true dreams of Matthew. Certainly there had been no greenery, though there had been a spiralling pattern to the streets in her coma-dream. Unless it was not trees Dragon meant when she spoke of a wilderness, for the cacti grove in Habitat had no trees and yet must be considered a forest of sorts. Dragon sounded very certain in her descriptions, which meant her memories were likely clear, and so I must trust to them more than to dreams. On the other hand, she had been very young when she was taken away by the Gadfians, and perhaps much had changed under the rule of the slavemasters.

‘What is Redport?’ I said, for the name was unfamiliar to me.

‘That is the name of the city. It was the slavers who talked of the Red Land,’ Dragon said.

‘Might it not be that Ariel was in Redport when the ships arrived and has since travelled to this mountainous land Dragon saw in her dream?’ Dameon suggested. ‘After all, the ships must long since have reached their destination.’

‘It might also be that Dragon dreamed of a meeting that happened when Ariel first fled to Norseland, after the rebels overthrew the Council and the Herders in the Land,’ I said, looking at Dragon. ‘Perhaps it was
that
rebellion the white-faced lord in your dream referred to, mistaking the Land for the Red Land.’

‘But the rebels were not killed in the Land,’ Dragon protested. ‘They won the highlands and lowlands and then they won the Westland and the Norselands.’

‘Still, Ariel might have lied to the white-faced lord about the outcome of the rebellion for his own purposes,’ I said. ‘He has lied before to those who believed that they shared an alliance. I think we must remember that even if the dreams we have are true, there is no way to know when they happened, or even in what order they happened. Nor can we take what anyone in them says as truth, because they could be lying or mistaken. I think we can accept that three of our ships reached the Red Land shore, and one was sunk upon arrival. However that could have happened a year ago or a sevenday ago, for the journey the four ships were to make was long and full of danger and uncertainty. I saw Rushton and Brydda and others cast ashore on an island in a true dream before ever we came to the Pellmar Quadrants, and it seems likely theirs was the ship lost along the way, but which ship was it? And our dreams seem to put Rushton and Matthew in the same place, which means one of the other ships may have spotted the castaways, taking them aboard and distributing them over the remaining ships so that they reached the Red Land. That would have overloaded them and put pressure on their supplies, which would have made it imperative that they replenish their provisions at the Spit. So I think we can accept they went there, but my recent dreams have shown Rushton in some wild, forested place where savage beasts of some sort run, and it does not fit anything I have seen or heard about the Red Land – Redport. You see how we could go on endlessly speculating, to no avail?’

‘I can’t help feeling I was meant to go with the ships and then all would have come out differently,’ Dragon said, sounding troubled.

Dameon shook his head decisively. ‘You cannot be the answer to all needs, Dragon. You do not know if your presence would have altered anything that has come to pass. In my dream, the ship that was sunk had not got through the Talons, so your presence aboard it would have made no difference, given your people will only rise against the invaders if they know you are there – if they
see
you. As Elspeth said, we assumed you were the means by which the four ships were to bring about the freeing of the Red Land, but none of the predictions said so.’

‘It might even have been worse if you were with them,’ I said. ‘If Ariel dreamed of us talking before the ships left, he would certainly have set Salamander to guard the way to stop you getting to Red Land.’

‘Then I am the reason the ships were under attack,’ she said.

‘My meaning was only that if you had been aboard one of those ships, you might very well have been killed,’ I said.

Dameon laid a hand on her arm and I saw the distress in her expression fade as he asked if there was any more than she had told me to her dream of the emissary from the emperor’s brother. It was a good distraction, for she immediately pondered it, a little furrow between her brows.

‘I remember the sails of the ship were a beautiful purple . . .’ she began, then broke off to say, ‘but the white-faced lord in my dream was not the emissary of the emperor’s brother, the one who wanted to buy a slave army as a gift. He told Ariel
he
served the emperor’s sisterwife.’

‘A sisterwife?’ Dameon echoed doubtfully.

‘A wife who is like to a sister?’ I suggested, some memory teasing at the edge of my mind but remaining elusive. ‘What
I
wonder is what Ariel was really up to in that meeting, whenever it happened. I do not believe for a second that he wanted no more than to meet the white-faced emperor. More like he wanted to get at the devices and machines the white-faced lords’ people are said to have mastered.’

‘Do you think he meant Sentinel when he spoke of a powerful weapon?’ Dameon asked. ‘Would he give it to the white-faced emperor?’

‘I do think he meant Sentinel, but he would never hand control of such power to anyone. More like he intended to use the offer to try to gain access to the white-faced emperor in order to coerce him as he did The One on Herder Isle. What frightens me is that Ariel speaks of proving the power of the weapon he is offering, and that could only mean he thinks to wake Sentinel. My fear all along has been that, newly wakened and with no way of knowing what has happened, it will take in all the destruction of the Great White as an attack and instruct the BOT computermachine to retaliate without realising all those responsible for what happened are long dead.’

‘But I thought you believed that Sentinel was responsible for the Great White,’ Dameon said.

‘I think the original Sentinel from Hegate at Inva either invoked the Balance of Terror computermachines or they acted on their own because Sentinel was attacked,’ I corrected him. ‘But I am convinced that the Sentinel I am to find, and which Ariel lusts for, is the final version of it, put into a computermachine in the remote facility set up to protect it by the sister of Kelver Rhonin’s friend Erlinder. I think it was never wakened and that I am meant to ensure it will not ever wake. But if Ariel reaches it first, he will want to wake it and use it. Dragon’s dream certainly suggests that is his intention, for he does not realise he will not be able to control it.’

‘Is it possible that this remote facility lies in the land of the white-faced lords and that is why Ariel is so keen to gain entry to it by pretending a desire to meet the emperor?’ Dameon asked.

‘It is a pity we do not know where the white-faced lords dwell,’ I said. ‘The only thing we do know is that they are far away in some very cold place.’ I frowned, remembering Jakoby’s discussion with Rushton about the spice bought by Councilman Kana coming from some cold place. Jakoby had said bluntly that the plan to amass a slave army had originated wherever the spice came from. Was it possible the spice came from the land of the white-faced lords?

‘If Sentinel is in the land of the white-faced lords, then Eden must be, too, and that is where the glide is taking us,’ Dragon said.

I was suddenly sick of speculating. ‘Let us speak further of it when the others are awake. Perhaps Swallow or Ana also dreamed of the Red Land or of these white-faced lords, and we will have more pieces to help us solve this puzzle.’

Dragon rose, her expression thoughtful and withdrawn, and said she would go and see if she could find one of the bed niches and sleep a little more. She brought Maruman to me but he was still soundly sleeping. I suggested she take him with her, to spare him the sight of the loathed moon.

Dameon rose abruptly and said he would do the same, and in a moment, I was alone again. I sat there pondering the fact that Dragon seemed suddenly to be feeling her duty as her mother’s heir very keenly. It occurred to me that, unlike the others, she had never chosen to accompany me on my quest. Indeed, Atthis had ensured that she would be brought to me as a captive, because she had some knowledge I needed. My only comfort was that if Dragon had gone with the ships, there was every chance she
would
be dead, or in Salamander’s hands, if not Ariel’s.

The fact that she had dreamed of Ariel and that he had spoken of her belonging to him chilled me, but he had said much the same sort of things to torment me when he had come to me in dreams in the past. The worst thing was that he knew about her. I had never been sure of it before. Indeed, I had taken comfort from the fact that he had not know of her. But if he knew exactly who and what she was to the people of the Red Land, he might very well have set up a blockade to ensure they never saw her.

Of course, it might also be that his interest in Dragon stemmed only from his hungry hatred of me, and the fact that I loved her. That hatred had been enough to see him use Domick cruelly and then destroy him, as he had sought to do to Rushton. Or perhaps he knew of Dragon’s Talent and thought to use
that
in some way. I shuddered at the thought of Dragon hollowed out to be used as a vessel for Ariel’s twisted desires. The only other possibility was that he had learned from his dreams that she had some part to play in my quest. I was so lost in my thoughts that it was some moments before I realised the glide was changing course again.

The vessel had not changed course for many hours and before that it had gone only slightly north-west or north-east. We had considered the possibility that the reason the glide was going north was simply because the high central spine of peaks was too high for the glide to cross, for Ana had told us the glide was not made to fly above a certain height. This meant that if our final destination lay to the west, the glide would be able to turn decisively in that direction only when the landmass and the mountains ended. It was Swallow who said there might be gaps in the high peaks low enough for the glide to negotiate, and now we were flying directly west.