“Keep away from the water,” the boy whispered. “It’s acid.”
Carefully they crept around the muddy pool that heaved and erupted in a pustulous mass, making for what looked like a cave at the base of a sheer cliff. The roof was so low they could barely sit beneath it without bowing their heads. Young wolf-dogs pushed and shoved around them, and there was the sharp, acrid smell of wild animal. Deborah watched the pups warily, so many tongues lolling, so many pairs of yellow eyes narrowed to slits staring back at her in the near darkness, and tucked her feet out of their way.
The young man reached out a hand and scratched the nearest head. Other heads pushed forward, tongues licked his fingers. He seemed hardly to notice. He watched Deborah, his eyes steady and unblinking like the dogs’. The mocking laughter had gone out of them; he was deadly serious now.
“Who are you? How did you get out?”
Deborah frowned. Despite the familiar touch of the boy’s hand, her father had warned her to trust no one Outside. Even without the warning, she would have been unlikely to confide in an unwashed individual who had caught her in a seriously humiliating situation. Not yet, anyway.
“If you’re a spy…”
“Of course I’m not a spy,” Deborah snapped. “Do I look like a spy? And if I was, what makes you think I’d want to spy on you?”
“No one wanders this desert who is welcome anywhere else,” the young man replied loftily. “Why are you here?”
“Would you want to live in Providence?”
“I’d rather live up a hyaena’s arse!”
“Well, there you are, then.”
The boy thought about it, and the pups waited, their eyes fixed on his expression. Then his face broke into a grin. “I could put you in touch with a reasonably well brought up hyaena, if you’re interested. Doesn’t suffer too much from flatulence.”
He raised his eyebrows as if he expected a reply, and Deborah laughed, suddenly immensely relieved. She had not realised how much of her tension had been caused by finding herself alone with a man, however young he appeared. In Providence the situation could never have arisen. Though it had once, in the House of Correction. Angrily she shook the unpleasant memory out of her head, and concentrated on savouring this completely new and, she had to admit it, exciting experience.
The boy began to look slightly uncomfortable. “Is there something wrong? Have I got something nasty in my hair?”
“What d’you mean?”
“You’re staring.”
It was Deborah’s turn to feel uncomfortable. She had been staring. Of course, she had been brought up to avert her gaze when she crossed men in the street, but she still noticed what they looked like. Both boys and men in Providence were pale, like plants grown in a cupboard. Schoolboys were skinny and lithe. They moved quickly, they snapped and fought, using a lifetime’s energy in the few years before they became adults. When they married they slowed and dulled, their flesh looked spongy and it sagged as they grew older. This man was wiry like a boy, but he was tall and well muscled without an ounce of extra flesh on him. His eyes looked as though they had lived a dozen Providence lives.
“It’s just that you look…different.”
“Different to what? A flatulent hyaena?” The young man flicked his hair out of his eyes, hair that in the harsh desert light was bright as copper wire.
Deborah shrugged. “Just other men. I couldn’t say for the hyaena—I’ve never met one.”
The boy’s eyes flashed, and he laughed. She had never heard anyone laugh like that. Except in her dreams. The last of her hesitations dissolved and Deborah dropped all her guards. He was wild and spontaneous and…different, not at all what she had been expecting. But what, in this turn her life had taken, was? She grinned to herself and launched into her story.
“They put me in the House of Correction, a sort of prison. I just wanted to get out, but then I met my father who I hadn’t seen since I was tiny, and he told me I had to get out right away, to find my mother.” She stopped. The boy was looking at her, waiting for her to carry on. Should she tell him about her mother, about the Memory? How else could she explain how she found the way out? It was a risk, but perhaps he could help her. “I found the door that was lost, a service door they forgot to block up when the war began. It led into that cavern where you found me.”
“Rescued you,” the boy corrected.
Deborah ignored him. “So, that’s all. You know the rest.”
“And where will you go now?” the boy asked. “Besides up a hyaena’s hole. You won’t last long in the desert.”
Deborah didn’t know about forests and mountains, didn’t even know the way north, nor how long it would take to get there. The boy might know. “I want to go north,” she said emphatically. “I want to find the forest and the mountains. My mother is there.” The boy was silent. “Please. Do you know how I can get there?”
The boy carried on scratching a pup’s ear and appeared to be thinking it over. “Who exactly is your mother?”
Deborah took a deep breath. “I don’t really know. She escaped from Providence when I was only five. The Elders wanted to kill her. My father says it was because she has the Memory. I think,” Deborah looked at the boy, pleading with him to believe her, “I think my mother is the one the Dananns call the Green Woman, the Queen.”
There was a silence, and the boy stared into space as he carried on scratching the pup’s ear.
“So, I suppose that makes you a Princess?”
“I mean it.”
“Look, Princess—”
“And don’t call me Princess, my name’s Deborah.”
The boy pulled a face and shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I prefer Princess. There was a woman back there called Deborah, a government minister’s wife. My mother used to do her laundry. She treated her like dog dirt. Great fat cow. Vicious too.”
Deborah couldn’t help smiling. “Okay, you win.”
“So you want to find your mother? Have you any idea where she went?”
“No more than I already told you. Father just said to go north, beyond the mountains. There’s a green place, whatever that means. That’s where she’ll be. Only I don’t know how to get there.”
Deborah wasn’t going to beg, and she didn’t know how to plead. She remembered the laughter in her dreams, the confident touch of a hand, and she realised she was counting on him. The boy gazed thoughtfully at her as if debating a particularly tricky question with himself.
“We’ve been hanging around this godforsaken hole for a week now, me and the pups. Just waiting for something or someone to turn up.” He gave Deborah another curious look. She held her breath. The boy flicked a lock of hair out of his eye, and his face broke into a broad grin. “I suppose it was you. All right, Princess. We’ll take you.”
Chapter 6
Sitting with his back to a flat slab of granite, Zachariah looked out of the mouth of the cavern where the tunnel from Underworld ended in a chaos of shattered rock and hills of debris. Earth and sky were the same sickly yellow, the air muggy and gritty with a hint of gases that caught at the throat.
In some seismic struggle the earth’s surface had buckled, and the mouth of the tunnel was now some hundred yards above the plain. A steep slope of smashed rock fell away to a broken landscape of sand, stunted bushes, and stony outcrops. Here and there jagged splinters of rock rose, some straight, some leaning crazily. Chasms and fissures split the earth, and the sandy plain was pockmarked with craters, some small enough for a man to curl up in, others several times the size of the great square of Providence and deep enough to hold the Protector’s palace. Quaking ponds popped and hissed as gas bubbles burst like boils at their viscous surface, the noxious fumes rasping Zachariah’s throat raw.
As he gazed in despair at the desolate landscape, an invisible current of air whipped up the sand into a whirling tower that screamed with an unearthly voice. The tower swayed back and forth, sucking stones and bushes into its vortex, climbing h
igher and higher until it lost its strength and fell back to earth with a hiss like gas escaping from a pipe. Stones and grit rattled along dry watercourses like the ghosts of rivers. Winds following the chaotic course of meteors howled and wailed among rock funnels and chimneys.
Apart from the mad dance of the sandwraiths and the quivering mud ponds, nothing moved. Sand-filled air mingled with the shifting dunes in an oppressive pall, dull ochre and arid, the shattered debris of the war to end all wars. Shading his eyes against the glare of the pale sand, Zachariah peered across the landscape, looking for a path, a sign of life, for anything that might indicate the entire world had not been reduced to a sterile wasteland.
Far away, his gaze was held by a great yellow rock that towered above the plain, taller than anything else in sight. It rose in jagged pinnacles, and its sheer sides appeared pierced with dozens of holes. There was an air of menace about the rock, as if unseen eyes were watching him from its depths, and Zachariah found himself crouching back into the shadow of the tunnel. He did not much feel like venturing out into the inhospitable plain where he would be completely exposed, but where else was there to go?
Zachariah’s spirits were beginning to sink as he opened his pack and took out the provisions Grania had packed for him. He drank sparingly from the water bottle, not knowing when he would be able to refill it. Then he unwrapped two small loaves, a lump of curd, and a half a rabbit stuffed with the pungent brown accompaniment the Dananns called mushrooms.
He shook the bag. There was something else lying in the bottom. He took out a small circular object, a case with a transparent lid. A compass! He remembered the theology lesson when the teacher had demonstrated how evil worked even within inanimate objects, drawing a simple metal needle towards the north, the region where the demons lived, where the Serpent Witch had fled.
Demonic or not, Zachariah picked up the compass and pressed it to his lips. The little needle showed him the north. He stared at the sandy plain with its rocks and its dry, brittle vegetation. North. He let the word take shape in his head—mountains, green forests, the Garden. North. At last he knew which way to go.
* * * *
Zachariah peered at the Yellow Rock glowing in the gathering gloom. It stood tall and menacing over the grey sand of the plain where it soaked up the last feeble rays of light and threw them back to where the boy crouched in his cavern, waiting for darkness. He had plotted a path with his compass that led him across the pitted plain. His landmarks were the rim of a crater and a monumental butte. He would follow the crater around a quarter of its circumference, then he would head for the butte that reared out of the desert, its flat top easily recognisable among the pinnacles and jagged peaks that littered the landscape. He had no idea how much he would be able to see in the night, but he trusted the butte would prove massive enough to make a mark against even the dreary dust-clouded sky of the wasteland.
As the shadows lengthened, fear of what lay hidden in the darkness of the tunnel returned, and Zachariah crouched in the cave mouth, his eyes fixed on the top of the scree slope. The opening through which he had slithered had seemed tiny in the daylight, but now, in the faint light of evening, it yawned, ominous and black. Rising winds rustled dry leaves and whispered through the canyons and dry gullies like dead voices.
He crept even closer to the rock wall at his back and began to long for the security of four walls and the night watch patrol. When even the Yellow Rock began to fade into night, he collected his things together to leave. Reluctant to turn his back on the dark-filled tunnel mouth, he edged his way backwards until he felt chill fingers on his spine, and a nameless fear made him spin round.
The caves peppering the walls of the Yellow Rock appeared to be seething and bubbling like flies covering a piece of rotting meat. Zachariah threw himself to the ground with a low moan and crawled deeper into the shadows. As he watched in horror, black shapes detached themselves from the moving mass and threw themselves into the air where they glided and soared, round and round, in ever widening circles about the rock. Then they rose, still turning, and a scream burst from their throats that raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
The light dimmed until he could barely see the winged shapes moving away, and the distance swallowed up their hoarse screaming. But not until the darkness was complete did he dare move from his hiding place.
Chapter 7
Deborah and the dog boy waited for the pup to return from leading Cerberus far out of their way then, with the pack, they left their hiding place and set off into the desert. They walked in silence, the pups scouting ahead, returning on soundless pads to guide them along paths that gave the best cover, keeping to the shadow of mountain-like stones and ridges, and the rubble of smashed rock formations. Sometimes they dipped into craters filled with boulders and scrubby bushes. Sometimes they followed the course of canyons cut out by extinct rivers or split open by some apocalyptic seism.
They were in one such canyon when the sky began to pale and the dog boy called a halt. A half dozen of the pups went off to look for a resting place, while others scattered to hunt.
Deborah threw herself into the shadow of an overhanging rock ledge. “Pffff! I’ve never walked so far in my life.”
“Far? We haven’t even set off yet! We’ve just been doing a few circuits of Providence to shake off old Cerberus.”
Deborah’s jaw dropped, and she felt the blood drain from her face.
“Joke!” The boy raised his arms above his head as if to protect himself. “Don’t you have any sense of humour at all, Princess?”
“I come from Providence, remember. Not Disneyland.”
“What’s that?”
Deborah shrugged. “I don’t know, something I saw in a dream once. It looked like fun. Why not tell me about yourself? I don’t even know your name. Your life’s been one great barrel of laughs, I suppose?”
“Not really.” The boy’s face clouded over. “My name’s Jonah, though no one has called me by it in years. I’ve been out here since I was a kid, eight years old, maybe nine. First, my father was killed in a mining accident. My mother was expecting a baby. When they brought the news that he was dead, the shock brought the baby on. It was the time when the Ignorant quarter was quarantined, do you remember? Some nonsense about disease. My mother was alone with me when it started. The wise woman only lived a few streets away, but we weren’t allowed out. I didn’t know what to do. Ma tried to keep calm, but the baby wasn’t the right way round, it couldn’t get out, and in the end she couldn’t prevent the screams. I screamed too, but the Black Boys still wouldn’t let the wise woman come to her.”
Jonah looked straight ahead as he spoke of his mother, his green eyes hardened and shone, but no tears fell.
“I watched her die. It was all I could do. Wipe the sweat from her eyes and stroke her hair, and wait for the baby to die inside her too. When it was over, I went numb, wouldn’t speak, couldn’t eat. I should have gone to live with my cousins, but I ran away. I don’t know why now. I liked my cousins. I went down into Underworld and just kept going, beyond where the lights ended and into this awful tunnel. If I hadn’t been blinded by tears, I’d have been scared shitless. It was black as hell in there! When I ended up Outside, I seemed to calm down. The harshness and cruelty of the place jolted me back to reality, maybe. Then the pups found me. If it hadn’t been for them I would certainly have died.”
“I’m sorry. About your parents.” A distant memory of a dream, hearing an unhappy child, weeping on a riverbank, came back to her. She remembered as a little girl, floating away from Providence, trying to find the child in her dreams to share his unhappiness. She had glimpsed him once, before the dream faded, but she had never found him.
Jonah attempted a dismissive shrug. “It was a long time ago.” Then his eyes lit up again, and his face broke into a grin. “Now I have a mission, to snatch damsels from the jaws of Cerberus. Especially when the damsels are beautiful and—” He blushed.
Deborah felt
herself blushing too and changed the subject. “What are the pups? I mean, where did they come from?”
Jonah’s brow furrowed. “The bombs brought back a darkness that grew on the carnage and destruction. It has grown into an entity, a sort of distillation of evil that calls itself Abaddon. It has taken on an animal shape and styles itself god of the desert chaos and king of the demons, or just plain Destroyer. I’ve felt its presence sometimes.” His eyes clouded, turned inward to a chilling memory. “Big as a mountain, darkness moving. Or filling a hollow with cold shadows. It whispers, and everything listens, even the stones.” He shivered. “Anyway, this Abaddon called up the dogs of war, and they had to go to him. It’s their destiny, you see, to fight. They had no choice. These are their pups. Haven’t you heard about the hosting of the Iron Horde?”
“How? The world could end and we wouldn’t hear about it in Providence. Not until the Wise God put his fist through the crystal Hemisphere, fed most of us to the demons, and whisked the Elders off to an eternity of bellyaching. Anyway, this Abaddon character, who’s he going to war against?”
Jonah lowered his voice. “The Green Woman has the Memory, and they say she has found the seeds of the tree of life. Abaddon wants the tree for himself. He will destroy her to get it.”
“Mother?”
Jonah nodded gravely. In a gesture she would not have imagined herself capable of a few days before, Deborah took Jonah’s hands in hers and clasped them hard.
“We have to find her, before he does.”
“Don’t worry, of course we will,” Jonah replied equally earnestly.
As they gazed at one another, neither of them asked themselves what possible help to the Green Woman they could be. The important thing was they were going north, and they were going together.
Chapter 8
Two figures stood side-by-side looking down across the broad, moonlit plain that spread before the rath, the High King’s ringfort. Two figures a man and a woman almost equal in height, waited. They waited in silence—the man, Oscar, for the decision of his queen. The queen, Medb, raised her eyes to the dark sky and listened, as if the music of a distant land could pass between the stars. Slowly she nodded her head and turned to her nephew.
The Dark Citadel (The Green Woman) Page 14