The Red Queen (96 page)

She nodded and left me to sleep. As I stretched out on my belly, I remembered to ask Rasial about the wolves, but she had not scented them since they had left the flying
glarsh
.

I sighed and laid my head on my crossed forearms. I was all at once so exhausted that my body felt as if it was floating. I drowsed on the edge of sleep for time, listening to Dameon and Ana talking about whether Dragon would need the sceptre of the Red Queen. Like me, they doubted anyone seeing her would need proof of who she was, then they went on to speculate about what raising a dragon might have meant in the Beforetime, given there were no such creatures.

I fell asleep to Dameon saying he thought
raising the dragon
might mean something quite different from anything we could imagine in these after days, because so much had been lost of the old world. There must inevitably be gaps in our knowledge. When I drifted uneasily awake again, it was a good deal hotter and the sun was directly overhead. The shade had gone but someone had set up a makeshift awning over me. Ana, Swallow and Dameon were sitting close to the side of the mound, now wearing Sadorian headdresses.

I turned on my side, and saw Gahltha standing over Gavyn and Rasial, shading them as they lay sound asleep. He was watching Brunt sniffing dubiously at Fey perched upright on the supine boy’s shoulder. The bird shuffled her feathers, perhaps disturbed by the goat’s breathing, and Brunt danced back and pranced in a circle.

I closed my eyes and sank into a very deep sleep.

I dreamed of Cassy, a very tall, solidly muscled woman, and a waif-like older woman with a wrinkled, weathered face, a radiant smile and very blue eyes that slanted up at the outer edges under a great cloudlike mass of silver and grey hair.

‘Thank you for coming, Maryka,’ she told the muscled woman. ‘We will need all the strength we can get to raise our effigy for the burning.’

‘I’ll be back for it, but I can’t stay on now. Cassy brought me out here in her hover. She’s on a stopover, waiting for the midnight glide from Castor to Inva,’ the tall woman said. ‘I believe you two will have a lot in common. Cassy, this is Sukarni, half Urolish, half Chinanka, half artist, half eco-warrior. She was the moving force behind that memorial installation at Hegate for the flamebirds.’

Cassy looked startled, and glanced at Maryka who was giving her a sly smile.

‘That makes four halves, and that was just an initial skirmish in what turned out to be the beginning of the eco-wars,’ Sukarni laughed.

‘A woman of many parts, our Sukarni,’ said a slight, brown-haired man, setting a crown of flowers and beads in the nest of her hair. Then he looked at Maryka and his face lit up with recognition. ‘You!’ He leapt at her and she caught him and hugged him extravagantly, lifting him off his feet. When she set him down, he hooked his arm eagerly through hers. ‘Come and see the effigy.’

‘I’m a wanted woman,’ Maryka called back to Cassy, fluttering her eyelashes. ‘What is it this time? A phoenix?’ she asked her assailant as he led her away, leaving Cassy with the older woman.

‘Something even more fiery,’ he laughed, ‘and this time we have a lot of tech people who have promised us something special.’

Cassy watched them walk away across the flat red plain shimmering in the heat. Beyond the edge of the land lay the sea, which ran uninterrupted to the horizon. The sun was hanging low, giving a reddish cast to everything. There were some constructions here and there but the sun was too bright to make them out clearly. People were moving about them and there was the sound of hammering, of words and laughter, of machinery and music. In the distance to the left, just visible on the edge of the land, were some buildings, their windows flashing red light.

‘What do you do, Cassy?’ Sukarni asked and Cassy turned back to find the older woman regarding her intently, tilting her head like a curious bird. Her eyes were very bright and full of intelligence. ‘Student?’

‘Artist. Well, student sculptor to be exact,’ Cassy said shyly. She hesitated. ‘I should tell you that my father is the Director of Hegate. I’m going to Inva because he wants to see me. But we don’t get along. I mean, I don’t share his beliefs.’

Sukarni smiled. ‘Maryka would not have brought you to me if you did.’

‘I loved your flamebird installation and the ideas behind it,’ Cassy went on. ‘Using art to protest is an amazing idea.’

‘It is not remotely a new idea, dearie. Art has always been used to record the world and to provoke change, or to signal a need for it. My burning installations are actually modelled on a remarkable festival that used to be held in early Mericanda called the Burning Man. It was artists who originally started that, for art’s sake, I believe. They chose a spot in the desert and made art for days and then burned it. But before it died out, it metamorphosed into a nexus of artists and survivalists, protestors and musicians, performers and conservation installationists. The art and the works produced became a sort of free and rather anarchic expression of yearning and fear and anger. The people involved were a lot of idealists and utopians; crazy people and conspiracy theorists half of them, setting up a little temporary kingdom of their own in the middle of nowhere.’

‘The flamebird installation at Inva was beautiful and dramatic. But sad, too.’

‘Sad?’ Again that birdlike cocking of the head.

Cassy shrugged. ‘You know, the flamebird facsimiles were such delicate intricate lovely things with those red wings and all the wheels and moving parts. They must have taken weeks to make and then they were gone just like that; all that beauty and intricacy up in smoke. It broke my heart.’

‘That was the point, dearie,’ Sukarni said gently, sadly, ‘that natural things and creatures are fragile; that human actions can destroy them as quickly and irrevocably as fire consumed the bird installation. Such things should break our hearts. You should stay a while. My friend Queenie who skippers the
Rainbow Dreaming
is planning a rescue at Ouroboros.’ She turned and lifted a hand towards the buildings on the coast behind her. ‘We mean to create a distraction that is both statement and protest. Art is the best medium for protests. It works on emotion and spirit rather than reason.’

‘I am a sculptor. And my work doesn’t burn. It lasts forever.’

‘Not even stone lasts forever, dearie,’ said Sukarni, ‘Everything that exists is fragile and can be destroyed.’

‘Elspeth!’

I woke to find Ana shaking me. ‘Swallow says all the food people who went into the nearest dome have come out and he reckons this is the right moment to get into the dome unnoticed.’

I struggled to my feet, still muddled from the strange dream, which had clearly been of the Beforetime. I was almost certain I had been dreaming of the very land we were upon, in the Beforetime. There had been no sunken plain and no cliffs, but I was almost certain the buildings I had seen were the ones whose remains I had walked through that very morning.

‘Ouroboros,’ I murmured. That was the name the woman Sukarni had used to speak of the place where ship fish were held. Not Eden. Not Sentinel. The events in the dream had surely taken place not long before the Great White, given Cassy’s age . . . 

‘What?’ Ana asked.

I let her haul me to my feet, saying, ‘I will tell you later.’

I turned to look past the edge of the dome. It was now mid afternoon and the fallen plain shimmered with heat, as in my dream. Redport seemed no more than a writhing mirage visible intermittently through veils of red dust lifted into the air by the wind. I noticed Gahltha standing close by, nuzzling Brunt who was perched atop yet another rock tower Gavyn had obviously constructed for him. As we made our preparations to leave, I beastspoke him to ask if he would ensure Brunt did not follow us.

‘He wants to stay with me,’ Gahltha sent complacently.

‘Well, keep an eye out for the wolves and for Maruman,’ I said, glad the black horse was preoccupied with the goat and not worrying about me going to Redport without him. Perhaps my safe return from the previous trip had reassured him.

‘Let’s go,’ Swallow said.

‘Aren’t you wearing the hooded cloak?’ I asked.

‘The food hoppers are not guarded, so I will save it until we get to the settlement.’ He deftly tied a scarf about his head as I had done, and thoroughly kissed a startled-looking Ana. I turned to find Dameon standing close by.

‘Be careful, dear heart,’ he said.

We set off across the plain pushing a hopper, which two coerced slaves pulled, Darga having loped ahead to see if he could sniff out where Dragon had entered the settlement.

By sheer chance, we had come upon the two slaves struggling with a mine hopper because they were down a man and another was ill. It had been the work of a moment to coerce the men, learn that they were conveniently two miners short, and to make them accept us as replacements. I had not used any subtlety in my coercion for we had been worried that other workers might come forward to see what was happening.

Despite being told there were crops within the domes, I had been startled and enchanted to find it was true. The smell of the air inside the dome was rich and sweet with the scent of green and growing things, for the entire dome was filled with crops of different colours – greens and yellows and purply browns – separated by neat walks. The crops were of varying heights but almost all had been planted in rows as neat and perfect as those in Habitat. I had no idea why they were grown in domes instead of outside in the open. If the fallen plain was inimical to crops, then why not make use of the higher ground to the north, which certainly supported some growth, and might be cultivated to support crops?

Whatever the reason, the crops inside the domes clearly thrived.

The strangest thing was that I had entered the dome, expecting it to be dark, but it was full of diffuse light. This was baffling to us both until we decided that the dome material was somehow allowing a certain amount of sunlight to pass through. Remembering how it had seemed to me when I climbed the dome, that the grains of dirt had somehow been set in some substance, I wondered if it was possible that there was simply enough space between them to allow filtered light to enter.

Water was another question but the air was moist and it was clear that there was no shortage of it. There were workers moving about the rows, tending the crops, but none were near. The silver rails that came through the entrance continued directly through the crops and out of sight beyond them, presumably to the mine entrance which, Swallow had already told me, was towards the back of each of the domes. He regretted not being able to go closer and see them, but I did not.

I had every intention of plundering the minds of the mine workers as we crossed the plain. I was curious about the mines, but what I really wanted to find out was if either man knew Matthew, for he had been a mine overseer once, if not now. I had entered the mind of one and then the other when we set off, seeking the best subject, and had been surprised and somewhat disappointed to find that neither man spoke much Urolish, for all they looked like Redlanders. It transpired that both had been recently stolen away from a barren little group of island settlements a good way to the west of the Red Land, which were often raided by Gadfians, possibly because the islands were on the route plied between Redport and New Gadfia. They had been fisher folk and taken off the water. Their lack of Urolish meant I had to delve beneath their conscious thoughts to gain an understanding of them, and though I could still rifle through their memories, and even decipher their thoughts, it took time, and it was easy to misunderstand things completely.

Another problem I quickly discovered was that, like Riyad, the minds of both men were limited by their ignorance and by a morass of superstition, so much of their understanding of Redport and the Gadfians and even the Redlanders was distorted.

The first thing I found out was that neither man had ever set eyes on Matthew. The man they thought of as their immediate master, and whom I took to be the current overseer of this dome mine, looked nothing like the farseeker. What I did learn was that both men had adapted happily to slavery, for their island lives had been very harsh, dominated by fears of being taken by a savage folk they imagined as beastmen, who came sometimes at night on what seemed to me to be rafts. Their people had spent much of their time hiding from these men or from the Gadfian slavers, keeping watch and preparing what were probably completely useless defences. In Redport, after their initial terror, both men had been taken by a Chafiri man and brought to the mines, presumably because they were big and strong. I did not know if he had bought them, or if they simply belonged to the Gadfians because I did not understand how slavery worked in Redport.

About halfway across the plain, the beast gave its awful howling growl and both men stopped and clapped their hands to their ears, convinced the beast had the power to capture their minds and lure them to their deaths. The incident roused in the man I was coercing a memory of an account of the creature’s lair by another miner who had been sentenced with his friend to a sevenday in the ilthum mine, and whose friend had been devoured. The man had not understood everything the miner had told his rapt and appalled audience in what seemed to me some sort of tavern in Slavetown, but I located the memory and was able to witness the account for myself.

The Landborn miner talked of the walk from the entrance to the ilthum mine, up along a wide, sloping tunnel that led to the dome. The tunnel was damaged in some way, no doubt by the tremors that caused the rifts and fissures on the fallen plain. I wondered with a shudder how the miners could bear to be beneath the ground when it shook, and how many were killed by the collapses I learned from the mind of the man were common. But of course they had no choice in the matter.

The man had explained that the opening to the lair of the Entina was halfway between the mine entrance and the top of the sloping tunnel that led back up to the dome. The two men had been pushing the small hopper each pair of miners filled and emptied continually into a larger hopper up in the dome, set on one of a series of silver lines branching off from the main line leading out of the dome and back to Redport. Two pairs of miners were assigned to one large hopper and this had been the last load for the day. The man’s friend had been coughing because he had caught mine blight and the other pair in their team had gone ahead in haste with their final load, fearful that the beast would be summoned by the man’s coughs. The man telling the tale had not had any choice but to remain with the coughing man, for though small, the hopper still required two to push it up the sloping tunnel, and failure to deliver the load would have resulted in another sevenday in the ilthum mine. He had cursed his companion after a particularly loud burst of coughing, bidding him ball some cloth and stuff it into his mouth lest they both be eaten. The other man obeyed and they were both relieved to find the coughs much muffled.

It was difficult to remain within the man’s mind listening to the tale, because it was so full of terror I found it hard not to be affected, but I persisted long enough to hear a man ask the tale teller why the miners did not simply stay on the other side of the tunnel to the beast’s lair, if it could not come out.

The miner laughed and said he wished it were so simple, but there were other cracks and crevices all along the walls either side of the lair opening, some of them breaching the floor of the tunnel. They might have been avoided, despite several being wide enough to swallow a man who fell into them, but a constant haze of mist flowed out from the entrance to the beast’s lair, making it difficult to see in that part of the tunnel. Moreover the mist had some property that caused confusion and disorientation, which sounded very like the effect of the cacti flowers when their scent sweetened, and this was seemingly the main reason miners stumbled into the entrance to the Entina’s lair or sometimes into the other cracks. The horrifying thing was that miners who fell into the other cracks would not die immediately, but would shriek and beg to be rescued, but before anyone could gather their courage, they would begin screaming in terror and fall abruptly silent, devoured by small voracious beasts that lived within the cracks. Some felt that being devoured by the Entina would be the better death.

I did not listen to the end of the tale, because Swallow pinched me and I realised we were almost at the edge of the settlement and I could see the small dome-like building into which the silver lines ran. I was not sorry to withdraw from the man’s mind, and cast about for Darga. He was making his way south along the edge of the settlement, and he reported that he had not yet found Dragon’s scent anywhere. I told him that we would push the hopper into the tunnel and make our way to the Long Pier and then look for the Palace Island. I showed him this in images as well as words, and he promised to seek me out if he found any trace of the girl.

‘With luck, he will find her trail and it will lead him to the Palace Island,’ Swallow said, as I coerced the men to continue pushing the hopper. As we entered the building, I felt the block fall over my mind again. I had wondered how we would see, but now I realised there were lanterns hung at regular intervals along the tunnel wall. The two men did not alter their behaviour to us, for I had planted several coercive commands deeply enough that they would remain even when I was not able to access their minds. But if they seemed to falter, all I would need to do was to touch them to impose control. We had not gone far before I felt my mind break free of the block. That was interesting, for it seemed the machine causing it suffered the same difficulty as Misfits did in using their talents through solid earth.

We guided the hopper along its rails down the tunnel, then the two slaves made some adjustments to the hopper before we continued down a steeper slope, and I realised they must have activated some sort of braking mechanism, for the hopper continued to move at a sedate pace and now there was little work to be done. The rails went down a good long way before flattening out, then we came to the place where the way forked. Here four burly men were waiting with clubs. They straightened, their eyes widening suspiciously as they took in Swallow and me. I reached out to the mind of the nearest and forced him to see Swallow and me as a slave team he had seen before, rather than strangers. Then I did the same to the man next to him and left them to argue with the other two.

Wondering why they were guarding the fork, I searched through their minds to discover they were there to ensure miners did not try to raid the food storages. For all the bounty I had seen in the domes, it seemed it was meted out carefully to the slaves, and this had led to a series of thefts. Weary of the argument, I brutally coerced all of the men, wiping the memory of our encounter from their minds, and ensuring they would stand dreaming for a time while Swallow and I made our escape.

‘I gather the block does not work underground,’ he said.

‘Fortunately not, or that might have been very unpleasant,’ I said.

‘I wonder if we ought to have stayed with the miners,’ Swallow said. ‘If there is anyone at the top of this tunnel . . .’ He fell silent and we stopped abruptly, realising we could hear voices. I motioned him to step close to the wall and to stay very still and I did the same. A group of miners appeared ahead of us, pushing an empty hopper back along the rails and arguing loudly. Wondering what miners did when they met others coming the other way, I carefully bent their minds away from us. After they had vanished, Swallow stepped back onto the rails, shaking his head and marvelling that I had the ability to render us invisible.

‘It is only a trick of the mind I learned as a child, but it is a good deal less tiresome than having to coerce a group of men. It’s only lucky you heard them before they saw us. It only works if they have not seen us to begin with.’

‘Did you hear what they were saying?’ Swallow asked, as we continued, the rails now beginning to slope up.

I shook my head. ‘I was somewhat preoccupied.’

He gave me a look. ‘They were talking of the emissary’s man. It sounds as if they mean one of his people is working some sort of refining machine in a building near the Long Pier. From what they were saying, the miners put the ilthum ore into a machine and it turns to powder. They were complaining because their portion is weighed after the process rather than before, and a good bit of waste matter is removed.

‘He must have come here on the emissary’s ship,’ I murmured, remembering my glimpse that morning of a purple sail. ‘It would be interesting to coerce him, for it might enable us to get some idea of what sort of arrangement Ariel made with his masters to deliver the weaponmachine he has promised. I wonder where
he
stays when he is in Redport.’

‘Probably on board his master’s ship,’ Swallow said. Then he sniffed. ‘I can smell the sea.’

He was right. I could feel a breeze too, and I welcomed it, for the air in the tunnel was thick and stuffy. Soon the tunnel ran steeply up and we saw daylight and then the mouth of the tunnel. We approached it very carefully, and peered out to find it opened into a walled yard. The rails split into several rails, each running to one in a number of single level, flat-roofed buildings that stood side by side, and which I supposed to be storage spaces. A group of slaves were standing before one of them, seemingly in some sort of heated discussion with two Ekoni and a man in a yellow robe with a yellow cap like the one worn by Nareen. From the way the Ekoni behaved towards him, I guessed he was a Chafir.