The Red Queen

by Isobelle Carmody

  “He said that we have to reach the worst tainted ground before sunrise tomorrow,” I said, turning to mount Gahltha.

  “Why sunrise? Is it because the wolves shun the day and need time to find shelter?”

  “I would reckon so but Rheagor didn’t say. What he did say is that we must make haste,” I said, reaching down to haul Analivia up behind me.

  9

  THUS BEGAN OUR ride across Blacklands that stretched bleakly, starkly east and north as far as my eye could see. The sky seemed to sag under the weight of heavy yellow-tinged clouds that roiled constantly without giving way to even a beam of sunlight. There was not a tree or plant or blade of grass growing anywhere, and barely a hill or hollow to break the endless scouring wind. All was gray and black under a dark sky reflected in water lying here and there, more like to puddles than pools.

  Behind us, growing ever smaller, were the mountains, running north out of sight, as black and jagged as rotten teeth. The wolf pack stretched out across the darkness like a long white and gray trail of smoke, and I followed behind on Gahltha with Analivia behind me, Darga loping at our heels. Sendari came behind the dog with Dragon on her now battered travois, as still and lifeless as a wax doll. Maruman had chosen to ride with her again, and he was curled up alongside her head in a bright nest of hair. Dameon rode behind them on Faraf, and Rasial and Gavyn came behind them, afoot, for the boy had refused to mount any of the horses. Swallow brought up the rear with Ahmedri on Falada. It was the tribesman who had suggested allowing the boy to run as he wanted, saying that when he was weary, he would soon enough change his mind about riding.

  I was less certain of it, for it seemed it was not willfulness or stubbornness that made Gavyn refuse to ride but a desire to run on his own feet. Certainly he seemed as tireless as Rasial. Not that the wolves were setting a fast pace. Rheagor had led us in a serpentine route across the dreadful dark monotony of the terrain.

  Analivia said nothing, and I reflected on the changes wrought in her by the death of her brother. She was not withdrawn and shattered as she had been before she made her fierce, brave speech when we first looked down on the Blacklands, but she was less inclined to offer her bright speculations and I had not seen her smile once since she had set eyes on Moss.

  Sometimes the wolves traveled so straight and swiftly that Gahltha was able to trot, but more often we walked, and once we even turned back for a time. I had begun the ride with apprehension edging on fear, but as the hours passed, the sheer monotony of the dire terrain dulled my fear and I realized incredulously at one point that I was in danger of falling asleep. It seemed an obscenity to be crossing this savaged land while struggling to stay awake. Nor was I alone, for after a time, Analivia slumped against me and nodded off.

  Rather than shaking her awake, I steadied her and let her sleep, stifling yawns and pinching myself occasionally. Half stupefied by the endless gritty wind blowing into my face, it took me a moment to notice that Rheagor was calling a halt. I told the others that we were to stop for a half hour even as the wolves wheeled and coiled together.

  It was impossible to say what hour it was with the sun hidden behind a barrier of dark clouds, but I reckoned it to be just past midday and wondered what sort of rest we could have on tainted ground. Yet Darga beastspoke me to say that we were on a patch of clean ground. I conveyed this to the others but was not surprised that, in spite of this, no one wanted to eat in the midst of the windswept wasteland under the lowering sky. Aside from all else, the grains of sand and the dust were doubtless tainted, and were we to eat, we would sup on that with every mouthful.

  Instead we dismounted and stretched our legs and backs, then adjusted the packs for the horses, salving and padding any rubbed places and bemoaning the fact that we had not slept while we had the chance the night before. It was a reminder of the expedition rule: to drink and eat and sleep while you could. We watered the horses, the dogs, and Gavyn sparingly, using a waxed canvas pocket, and the rest of us took a sip of water before stoppering the water bottles, for we had no idea when we would be able to refill them. In truth, I was worried about the horses, for we had not water enough beyond a day, and they would need a good deal more than we had.

  I told myself that Rheagor and the wolves needed water, too, so he must know where there were soaks and springs. But I longed to ask him outright. I also wanted to ask him about the journey his ancestor had made and what he had seen of the city while he was the captive of the efari. I glanced over at the wolves and realized with surprise that I was beginning to resent the way Rheagor kept himself and his pack so fiercely separate from us.

  Turning my attention back to the horses, I noticed that they had moved into a group and now stood together, rumps to the wind, nuzzling and nibbling at one another. Seeing this, it struck me yet again how superior beasts were to humans in how they dealt with adversity. In the midst of this destroyed land, they stood close and took what comfort they could from one another, rather than agonizing in isolation about what would happen next, as I was doing and, as it seemed from the expressions on their faces, what the other humans in our party were doing. Aside from Dragon, who slept, oblivious of the tainted land and lowering sky, Gavyn was the only anomaly, being human and yet seemingly capable of the same serenity as beasts. He had sat down as soon as the column of wolves broke up, and now he was leaning contentedly against Rasial, who had stretched out with him, gazing up at the dark clouds in evident fascination.

  I wondered what he saw with his spirit-eyes, and then I wondered about Fey, who had vanished at some point during our journey from the hollow where she had attacked Moss. Was the owl’s attachment to the enthraller so potent that she would try to fly across the Blacklands to rejoin us later, and if so, how would she manage to locate Gavyn? She was not a dog to sniff a trail, even if that had been possible on tainted ground, yet birds had eyes that could see very far and they flew in patterns and returned season after season to the same nesting place at the same time of year, so perhaps, just as the wolves saw clean earth amid tainted land, birds could see trails in the air that humans and other beasts did not.

  I noticed that Dameon was standing close to Rasial and Gavyn, and it struck me that the boy was probably the most peaceful company the empath could have, since he appeared not to experience emotions as other people did. I understood now the reason for Gavyn’s inability to relate to other people, yet the knowledge had roused a whole new thorny crop of questions. Perhaps it was always so with true knowledge.

  “This is a queer sort of storm,” Swallow muttered, and I turned to see him gazing up at the low ceiling of black clouds, arms folded across his chest. Lightning had begun to play and shimmer over the underside of the clouds and I heard a low muffled rumble of thunder. The gypsy looked at me. “It looms and mutters but does not break.”

  “It seems the weather is always strange where the earth has been tainted,” I said, shrugging. “Look at the pass up to the valley where Obernewtyn stands, how it often rains there when it rains nowhere else.”

  “It was worse when I came to Obernewtyn,” Dameon said. “There were constant storms in the pass, and yet travel a little way either side of it and the sun was shining.”

  “I remember there was a storm the night I arrived at Obernewtyn,” I murmured. “I was so afraid, and yet I did not know that I was going to a place where I would eventually find everything I ever wanted in life.” Until I had to leave it, I thought. But the ache that usually accompanied thoughts of Obernewtyn was tempered by the knowledge that I had left to ensure that it and all of the other green, sweet places left in the battered world would not be reduced to this bleak deadness.

  “The ground is very wet over here,” Ahmedri observed. The tribesman was now standing in a dip in the ground where the wolves had initially clustered.

  “Groundwater,” Swallow said triumphantly after stamping his foot. “See how it wells up in the print? The wolves were drinking from it, I warrant, so it must be clean.” Without further a
do, he knelt and dug a hole, then summoned the horses to drink.

  “Well, we can suppose that if there is one seep of clean water, there is like to be another,” Dameon said cheerfully.

  “It will have to be somewhat more than a muddy puddle before I stoop to drink from it,” Swallow said with distaste. He looked at me. “I noticed a good bit of water lying on the ground as we rode. Somehow I never imagined Blacklands being so wet. The tainted terrain about the Land is dry and dusty as bone.”

  “In Sador, too,” Ahmedri said, before going on to suggest that as far as water went, we should all refill the bottles on our belts from those in our packs before remounting.

  “I feel sick,” Analivia said suddenly, fearfully, as she stoppered her bottle after having helped me to force some water into Dragon.

  “It is too soon for us to be reacting physically to the taint if the terrain is only mildly poisonous,” Swallow told her gently. Then he sighed and glanced to the east. “I daresay we will all suffer bellyaches and headaches once we begin to approach the glowing Blacklands.”

  “I think we are sickened by what we see, not from it,” I told Analivia, but I spoke absently, for Swallow’s words had made me uneasy. I had always assumed my healing abilities would protect me from dying of exposure to tainted ground, but the others had no such protection. I wished suddenly that I had already mentioned the healing ability Nerat had given my body, for it seemed a cheat that I was leading them to a place where they could die when I hadn’t bothered to tell them that I would likely survive.

  Analivia went to the other side of the horses, mayhap to vomit. I kept my back to her, as the others had done when I had relieved myself, for there could be no true privacy on the open plain when we dared not venture away from our companions. Sometimes on expeditions it had been the same and there was no use in being foolishly coy.

  “Prepare tha pack to go on,” Rheagor sent to me, and withdrew before I could even acknowledge his words.

  Sighing, I bade the others mount up and climbed back onto Gahltha, wondering what it would take to crack the wolf’s icy reserve. If anything, he seemed more withdrawn than when he had first agreed to go with us, but perhaps that was because two of his pack had since died, and he had foreseen that more would do so before the journey was done.

  And not only wolves, I reminded myself, reaching down to help Analivia up. But Swallow stopped me, suggesting that she ride with Ahmedri, for Falada’s sake, since he and the tribesman together weighed rather more than Analivia and I. After he helped her to mount up behind the tribesman, he vaulted up behind me and we set off again. Maruman still slept unmoving beside Dragon’s head, and I felt a touch of unease, wondering if he had once again entered the girl’s dreams. The next time we stopped, I would wake him regardless of how soundly he slept. That reminded me that I had not yet asked Rasial what she and Gavyn had been doing the night Moss died, when they had lain down to sleep on either side of Dragon.

  Next time we stopped I would have an answer, I told myself.

  “I see no difference between the places we walk and the places we avoid,” Swallow said. “Do you think the wolves see where the taint is thinnest, or scent it?”

  “I would have said they use their noses, but their sensitivity to light makes me wonder,” I answered. “Think how badly tainted terrain glows in the dark. In fact, it glows all the time, but our eyes are incapable of seeing it when the sun shines. So might it not be that a lesser glow comes from less tainted ground, which we also cannot see? The wolves might have the ability to see that and to tell how potent the taint is by the color of the glow, or by its density.”

  Two hours later, I was again yawning and pinching myself to stay awake. It was the endless dreary sameness of the terrain that was making me feel as if we were riding on the same spot for hour after hour. I wished that Swallow would talk, but we were all now wearing muffling kerchiefs over our faces, Sadorian desert style, to avoid inhaling tainted dust, for the wind had strengthened since our last stop, and it was hard to hear anything above its sullen whine. Overhead, lightning flickered and thunder rumbled, but the storm did not break.

  Hour after hour we rode across the dead black plain, stopping once, twice, and thrice on inexplicably untainted patches of ground. The last was so small that the wolves were forced to remain close to us, and once again they lapped at a muddy slush of untainted water lying in a shallow dip in the ground. I noticed that the wolves stayed as far from Rasial as they could and that the cubs were kept separate from Gavyn, for he seemed as appealing to them as ever.

  I woke Maruman, who seemed confused and disorientated rather than irritated, as I had anticipated. That troubled me, for such moods often presaged one of his withdrawals, but there was nothing to be done about it. I made him drink some water from my hand, for he refused to leave the travois, and immediately he settled back to sleep. When Rheagor beastspoke me to prepare my pack to depart, I tried to ask him some of the questions plaguing me, but infuriatingly, he merely reiterated his cold demand that we make haste in order to reach the graag before sunrise the following day.

  We rode through the dark, wild day into a darker night, but although the sky was cast over, the moon was bright enough that its light penetrated. Yet still I could see that some of the puddles of water we rode by had a very faint greenish glow. That made me wonder how it was that some of the water we had seen on the plain was tainted while the seeps where we rested were not. If we had been in the mountains, I might have thought it was the doing of the taint-devouring insects, but there was no way they could have got so far out on the plain in the midst of tainted Blacklands.

  The next time we stopped, there was again a seep of water, and when Darga pronounced it clean, I sent back that I only wished it was a proper pool, for although Ahmedri and Swallow had been meticulously digging a hole at every seep so that there would be water for the horses and dogs to drink, it was very muddy and the bottles of clear water we carried were almost empty.

  “Maybe it is enough to be grateful for water that is clean and to hope the next seep is a little deeper,” Dameon said.

  Ahmedri wanted to count the full bottles we had left and ration mouthfuls, but it would have meant unpacking everything to locate them all, so we merely resolved to be even more careful and sparing with the remaining water. At least the horses and dogs were drinking the ground water and we might be grateful enough to do the same ere the end.

  We rode on and after a time the wind dropped, so that the night became very still and silent save for the soft thud of the horses’ hooves. I was able to remove the face cloth I had been wearing but the air had a dead, odd scent that I recognized was the odor I had taken for the smell of the sea. It was truly not much like the smell of the waves.

  Once again I began to drift to sleep. I pinched myself and hummed softly and bit my lip, trying to stay awake. Then Gahltha was stopping. It was too soon to rest and Rheagor did not tell me we were to stop, but as I struggled to rouse my sluggish wits, I saw that the white wolf and several of the other frontrunners in the pack seemed to be in consultation.

  “What does he say?” Swallow asked, yawning.

  “Nothing that any human is privy to,” I said, and suddenly became aware that I could no longer hear thunder. But when I looked up, I could still see the flicker of lightning in the clouds, and still the moon had not shown its face, though as ever, some sort of gray light filtered through, else we would have been unable to see a thing. I turned to check on how the others were faring. Dameon looked exhausted, but Swallow seemed alert, as did Ahmedri. Analivia was pale but very calm and it occurred to me that Dameon had been empathizing her. But he could not empathize continuously for hours on end.

  Rheagor set off again without offering any explanation for why we had stopped. I wondered if we were still heading east. It was impossible to tell without landmarks and it was too dark for me to make out the mountains we had left behind. But so far as we knew, Jacob’s city was northeast. At least, it was if
he had been right and a city had grown where once there had been a settlement of some kind, called Pellmar Quadrants.

  “Ye gods,” Swallow murmured soon after, shaking me and pointing ahead. “Look.”

  I realized that I had been dozing, for I was slumped back against his chest and one of his arms was wrapped around my waist. I sat up, embarrassed, remembering the kiss he had once stolen, but then I saw what he was pointing to and my skin grew cold, for the ground ahead gave off a halo of the distinctive greenish yellow glow of badly tainted matter. Worst of all, we seemed to be making for a slight rise, beyond which the glow was brightest.

  “Ask the wolf if we must go where the taint is the worst,” I sent to Darga.

  “The graag do be ahead,” Rheagor beastspoke his answer directly, distantly.

  “I can see that for myself,” I muttered, but the wolf had gone from my mind.

  Within an hour the lead wolves had reached the bottom of the long slope that we had been moving toward and were flowing up it. It looked black to my eyes, with the glow of taint shining up behind it, and it was clear that we were making directly for the leading edge of the glowing terrain, for the ground on either side of the slope did not glow for a good way farther on. Why would we enter the nearest tainted ground? I knew well that any ground that glowed like this was virulently poisonous. So far as I could see, there were no darker places in the halo of light to suggest there were less tainted patches. Was it possible I had mistaken the wolves and Rheagor had meant only that he would lead us to the graag by the least tainted route they could find?

  The wolves poured up the slope and vanished, but when Gahltha reached the top, I did not see them racing down the slope as I had anticipated. The hill was cut off by a blunt cliff that dropped away, as if someone had cut a wide slice from the center of the hill, leaving a gap where they had then dug a deep, wide hollow that had filled with water.