She was a good ten years older than when last I had seen her, but there was no mistaking her. It was Cassandra.
I was shocked, because I had never seen her at this age before, and because it meant I was again dreaming of her in the days after the Great White.
The child gave a laugh and pounced on a kitten that had been stalking them through the grass. Its markings and yellow eyes were Maruman’s and I wondered if this was the cat Analivia had dreamed of, lying in Hannah Seraphim’s arms. But no, this must have been one of its kittens, given how many years older Cassy was. The woman reached out to the kitten to rub his belly and he went limp with pleasure in the girl’s arms.
Definitely not Maruman, I thought. He would have my hand off at the wrist if I tried to rub his belly like that. But then I remembered I had never known him as a kitten. Maybe he had been like this before whatever had befallen him.
The child set the kitten down and plucked a blade of grass, which she began to wiggle enticingly. The kitten’s eyes went black and he flattened himself to the ground, twitching his rump and tail before pouncing, spitting and fizzing. The child shrieked with laughter.
I noticed that she had dark green eyes fringed with heavy black lashes. Not Cassandra’s child, for she had borne only one child and it had been the boy, Evander. This was likely the child of one of the Beforetime Misfits, who had later become the Twentyfamilies of the Land.
“Is it only when I am asleep that we can come here? Grass is so nice,” said the girl in a wistful, piping voice. Her little round face and green eyes were very serious under a dark ragged fringe that looked as if it had been hacked off with a blunt knife.
Cassandra wriggled her fingers and laughed when the kitten shot out a paw to bat at them. Then she looked at the child and said, “Hannah has seen true green grass growing in the world, and she has promised me that all three of us will see it before we die.”
“Does she see everything?” the little girl asked, eyes wide.
“Not everything, but maybe too much, little one.” There was pity in Cassandra’s face now.
The kitten suddenly stretched, and two transparent golden wings burst from his back. He unfurled them, flew up gracefully, and vanished. “Oh, why did you make him go?” asked the girl, sounding disappointed.
Cassandra said gently, “Merimyn visits our dreams as he chooses, dear one.”
The child gave the older woman an arch smile from under her fringe. “I know you made him up for me.”
Cassandra laughed. “Believe what you will, child, but I did not create Merimyn.”
“Then who did? Mama?”
Cassandra hesitated and then shook her head slightly, as if deciding something. “Why, he made himself up. But the one thing I do know is that no one is his master.”
The little girl gave her a skeptical look from under the fringe and then said solemnly, “When I grow up, no one will be my master either.”
“That is a fine ambition.”
The child sighed and looked around. “It is so black and ugly when we are awake. And the muties frighten me.”
“Don’t call them that, child. It’s not their fault they are as they are,” Cassandra said. She drew the child into her arms and kissed her head. “We must pity them, even if we can’t help being frightened of them. But soon we’ll set sail and leave this dreadful land to them.”
I felt myself being shaken and the dream dissolved as I opened my eyes to find it was morning and Swallow was looking down at me with consternation. I blinked at him, groggy from the depth and intensity of my past-dream, and said, “His name was Merimyn.”
Swallow said in a low, urgent voice, “Elspeth, listen to me. The body has gone.”
I sat up, struggling to understand. “Not Dragon?” I gasped.
The gypsy shook his head impatiently. “Dragon sleeps. I mean Moss, who was dead. Is dead, but gone. You recall that we dragged his body just outside the hollow last night—over there—so that it would not be the first thing Analivia saw when she got up, but when Ahmedri and I went just now to carry him up to build the cairn about him, he was gone.”
I climbed out of my bedding and went with the gypsy to the place where he and Ahmedri had laid the dead man. There was nothing to indicate he had ever been there, not even a telltale smear of blood. “Something must have been drawn by the scent of blood.”
“It is no mere firelizard or cave rat that can haul away a man that size in such silence that a tribesman does not hear a thing,” Swallow said. “And where are the tracks?”
I looked over to the fire, where Analivia was folding her blanket and rummaging in her pack. “She doesn’t know yet?”
“I cannot judge if she would bear telling after last night,” he said. “We could say that we buried him by hurling him into the abyss.”
I shook my head. “We must tell her the truth, for what if we were to come upon the remains of his body suddenly?”
Swallow looked doubtful but he followed me back to the fire where Analivia knelt. She glanced at us, her expression remote, but her face changed as she took in our manner. She stood up. “What is the matter?”
“Ana, Ahmedri and Swallow dragged the body of your brother away from the camp last night. They meant to build a cairn over it this morning, but it has vanished.”
“Moss is alive?” Alarm flashed in her eyes.
“No!” I said quickly. “He was well and truly dead last night. I meant that we think some beast or several carried him off in the night.…”
She stared at me for a long moment and then gave a shaky laugh, but her expression was hard. “Did you truly think I’d have hysterics because of some beast gnawing on Moss’s bones?” She shook her head emphatically. “I cannot mourn for the death of a man who did me so much ill, much less for his body. But in truth, even if I had loved him, it would not offend me to think beasts had taken him for a meal. A body is no more than flesh. After all that you have told us of Ahmedri’s brother Straaka, I know that we are far more than bones and skin and blood.”
Swallow and I gaped at her in wonder, and then the gypsy laughed and said, “You are a marvel, Ana.”
The admiration in his voice did not make her smile. She reached down to grab a pot of water standing in the ashes and carried it over to Dragon, where she knelt and began to bathe the dirt from the girl’s face, her expression closed and her cheeks pale.
I thought of what Dameon had said and wondered how to convince Analivia that we did not blame or judge her for what had been done to her. Swallow shook his head and began to make porridge, saying that we had better set up an armed watch in the future. Then Ahmedri called him to help make Dragon’s travois. I took over preparing the porridge. It was beginning to bubble sluggishly when Dameon came down into the hollow. His wet hair and damp pink face told me that he had been bathing and I had a sudden urge to do the same.
“How did you manage to wash your hair in those trickles of water?” I asked.
“Slowly,” he said drily.
Realizing this might be my last chance to bathe for some time, I decided to make the effort. I left the empath to stir the porridge, got some clean underwear and soap from my pack, and went up to bathe.
Dameon had been right about it being time-consuming. The water fell in icy trickles from the stone arch, but it was a pleasure to be clean and afterward I washed my smallclothes as well. I had managed not to anguish over the fact that Dragon had not woken, and when I returned to the hollow, Ahmedri and Swallow were lifting her gently onto the travois they had created.
Analivia came to me, carrying her towel and soap, and said she was going to bathe as well.
“How is she?” I asked, nodding toward Dragon.
“She stirred as I bathed her wounds and once she cried out in pain when I sewed a deep gash on her leg, but she did not come near to waking. None of her wounds are fatal or poisoned and I would say she has not been exposed to a dangerous level of taint.”
She went out of the hollow toward the
weeping stone arch and I went down to sit on a stone beside the travois, thinking of my dream of the dragon flying with the wolfman that was the merged spirit-form of Gavyn and Rasial. Had they been flying with her spirit-form in the night? I had thought they were healing her but there had been something joyous in that mad flight, swooping down to touch the waves and then flying up on a tide of song. But it could not be that Ari-noor had flown with them.
Dragon’s face and arms were clean now, but her hair was still a tangle. I got another bowl of water from the fire and carried it back to wash her hair as best I could, then I toweled it dry. She did not stir as I combed out the snarls and tangles, but I told myself that her heavy sleep was a natural enough consequence of the terrifying ordeal she had endured at the hands of the taint-sick Moss. Aside from being battered, she was very thin, and I reckoned the deranged man had not fed her for days on end. Unfortunately, there was no way to fatten her until she woke and could take food of her own free will. Until then, we had no choice but to coerce her to drink and eat, just as we had done when she had last fallen into a coma. Her mind would not let me in but fortunately it was possible to coerce her body without touching her mind.
“I have never seen hair that color,” Ahmedri said, coming to stand by me.
“The Red Queen,” I said.
“It is strange to think that my brother’s woman lies in an enforced sleep and now it is the same with this child. It is like a plague of sleep,” he murmured.
I looked at him. “Why do you never speak Miryum’s name?”
“She never gave me leave,” he said, and turned away.
I went to the fire and Swallow handed me a bowl of porridge dribbled with honey and studded with a few dried berries, saying that was my share and that Analivia had cleaned the pot before going to bathe. He rose then and said he was going to begin preparing the packs to be loaded on the horses, for everything would need rearranging because of the travois.
I promised to bring my own pack to him as soon as I had broken my fast. I barely tasted the porridge as I spooned it up, for I was thinking of my dream of Cassandra and wondering if it had been a past-dream or just a vivid but ordinary dream. As if aware that I was thinking of a kitten that bore a name like to his, Maruman came padding over to me and gave the bowl a pointed look. I set the remainder of the porridge down for him and went to roll up my blanket before I carried my pack to where Ahmedri and Swallow were loading up the horses.
“I could carry my funaga and another,” Faraf was beastspeaking Gahltha.
I was startled by her use of the possessive term when she spoke of Dameon.
“Faraf has taken on the desert tradition that a human and an equine can bond out of friendship and mutual regard,” Gahltha informed me, sensing my surprise. “She regards Dameon as her man in the way that Falada regards Ahmedri as hers. If I thought in that way, I would name you my Elspeth.” He gave a soft whicker of amusement.
For some reason, I found myself thinking of what the tribesman had said about a plague of sleep.
“Mornir will wake,” Gahltha assured me, suddenly serious.
“The last time she slept like this, it was for many long moons.”
“This is not such a sleep as that, ElspethInnle,” Maruman sent crossly, coming to sit on a stone.
I wanted to ask what sort of sleep it was, then, but I sensed he was in a cantankerous mood, so I held my tongue. I would ask Rasial about Dragon when she and the boy returned. Ahmedri helped me fasten my pack and the stone sword and the bow and arrows to the webbing on Gahltha’s back as he explained that the horses had decided that the gray’s gait was smoothest and so he would pull the travois.
“I am the strongest of the equines,” Gahltha added, “but strength is needed less than smoothness.”
Once the other horses were readied, Dragon’s travois was fastened to the webbing on Sendari’s back. While she helped with it, Analivia seemed very much her old self, but the moment it was done, she moved away from the rest of us and stood gazing to the north. I wondered if she thought of her brother or of the Blacklands that lay beyond the mountains.
“Time to go?” Swallow asked at last, laying a hand on my shoulder.
I nodded and went to mount up on Gahltha. Swallow gave Analivia a leg up behind Ahmedri on Falada and then he leaped up behind me. Dameon sat on Faraf, and to my surprise, when I called to Maruman to get up, he climbed into the travois and curled up alongside Dragon’s head, just as he had done when Dragon had lain in the Healing Hall at Obernewtyn locked in her coma dream.
Ahmedri took the lead on Falada, as he knew the way already, and Dameon followed on Faraf with Sendari behind. Swallow and I brought up the rear on Gahltha. I was thinking again of what the tribesman had said about a plague of sleep, for it had occurred to me that it was not just Miryum and Dragon who lay sleeping, waiting to be wakened. Somewhere in the world, Sentinel waited to be wakened, too. Yet it was not my task to wake the computermachine program but to ensure it never woke. If I failed, it was the Destroyer who would wake Sentinel, and then a plague of sleep would truly come, but it would be the longsleep, from which none would ever wake.
8
BY MIDDAY, THE scent trail left by the wolves on the Beforetime road had brought us around to the east to a humped line of mountains that Darga pronounced tainted. The broken road curved back to the north, but the wolves’ spore went east, so we left the road to toil up and down the hills, winding back and forth around what must be virulent patches of tainted ground. It was only when the sun was setting behind us over the high, dark spine of peaks to the west that we had our first sight of the Blacklands between higher peaks rising to the north and south.
All that day, the others had spoken eagerly of getting to a place where we would finally be able to see our way clear of the mountains. I had said nothing to their comments and speculations, knowing what awaited them. But I had forgotten how dreadful that vast darkness spreading out beyond the High Mountains was, or maybe the impact on me was magnified by the knowledge that we had to cross it. When we reached the zenith of the long slope we had been climbing, we found ourselves with a clear, if narrow, view to the east. Hopeless dismay rose in my heart at the sight of the grim black plain that ran away from the mountains to the horizon.
It was night already where ink-black shadow stretched out from the foot of the mountains, but beyond it, where the ruddy light of dusk still fell, there was no feature visible between the mountains and the horizon, save the occasional dim glimmer of a pool of water.
I tried to tell myself that it looked darker and bleaker cast over with the red of the setting sun, but I knew it would look a good deal more terrible when it was dark enough for the worst tainted ground to give off its distinctive greenish glow. The thought of venturing into that black and deadly wasteland suddenly seemed the maddest and most pointless thing anyone could possibly contemplate. How had the Agyllians imagined I should take others with me? They would die and I would stagger on alone, my body slowly devouring itself trying to find the strength to heal me until I fell, too. But even if I could cross it and find Cassandra’s key, how was I then to make my way to the Red Land to deal with Sentinel?
For some reason, I found myself envisaging the words Cassy had carved, translated into Fian’s spidery script.
[That which] will [open/access/reach] the darkest door lies where the … [lies/sleeps]? Strange is the keeping place of this dreadful [sign/key] but there is no other, for all who knew it are dead save one who does not know what she knows. Seek her … past … Only through her may you go where you have never been and must someday go … danger. Beware … dragon.”
I felt as if someone had kicked me in the stomach, for I had always read the clue as pointing me to Dragon’s past, and hence to the Red Land where she had been born, and the futuretellers’ predictions about Dragon and me being there together had seemed to confirm that I was to travel to the Red Land. There had been other things, too, that had supported this belief—that
Ariel had gone there and that Swallow had seen a vision of us together in the place where the ancient promises had been made. But what if the futuretellers and Swallow had misinterpreted their visions? What if Dragon had learned what I needed to know in the Red Land, and Sentinel was on the other side of this black waste, in the very city we were seeking?
In that case, it did not matter to my quest that my companions would all die. Indeed, had not Dell foreseen that I would leave all I loved behind me? Nor would it matter if I died, so long as I lived long enough to find Sentinel and do what must be done.
I tried to think clearly, to marshal all that I had learned from my dreams and from Cassandra, but my thoughts flew like leaves of reason in a storm of fear.
I forced myself to look at the others and to remember that they had even greater cause for fear than I, wondering if this was the moment they would balk. Truly I would not have blamed them.
Analivia had dismounted when I did and she was standing beside me. Her yellow hair had a strange greenish tinge from the fading sunset behind her, but her face was shadowed so that it was hard to see her expression. Ahmedri stood on the other side of her, turned sideways so that the bronze light of the fading dusk showed his grim expression, and that of Swallow’s beyond him.
“It must be very bad,” Dameon said softly, and I turned the other way to see he was swaying beside me, his face gray. With a cry of remorse, I took his arm and made him sit down on the ground. This broke the stunned and dreadful silence of the others.
“He feels what we feel—all of us,” I reminded them, knowing that none of them had the ability to shield their feelings to spare him. Even I had only a rough emotional shield that I had never properly mastered.
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