The Red Queen

by Isobelle Carmody

  Analivia had begun to describe it to Dameon, but when she spoke of the whiteness as a plain, Ahmedri said flatly, “It is not a plain.” He pointed away to the horizon. “Those are dunes. It is a desert.”

  I squinted and could not see anything other than whiteness, but I did not doubt he had seen what he said, for a Sadorian would know very well what dunes looked like.

  “Look there,” Swallow said, pointing to a large body of water shining silver in the moonlight at the margin of Blacklands and white desert. The pool was wide at one end and narrowed at the other like a tear. At the wide end of the lake was a large outcropping of black rocks. I did not see how this could be the clean water Rheagor had mentioned, since it was surrounded on one side by tainted ground, but there was no other water in sight and Rheagor turned to the southeast to make directly for it. It was not until we were quite close that I saw the narrow end of the pool gave forth a thin stream that meandered away to the south along a deep, narrow channel that ran precisely along the border between the barren gray-black terrain that was the end of the Blacklands and the white plain. This suggested that the pool was formed about a spring, which was gradually running away in a stream.

  From a distance, I had not seen steam coming off the surface of the pool, but when we were closer, I noticed there was water welling from the top of the mound of stones at the northern end and running down it into great flat boulders that appeared to have been sculpted by the flow into natural bowls. From these, water spilled into the pool, which was truly large enough to be called a small lake. A veil of steam hung above the brimming stone bowls, but not above the lake, whose surface would have been like a silver mirror in the still night, save for widening ripples emanating from where the spring water entered it.

  It was only after I had been helped down from Faraf that I saw the lake lay in an enormous rounded slab of stone half buried in the ground and connected to the mound of rocks from which the spring flowed. Darga sniffed at the spring and pronounced it clean but the lake tainted. However, Rheagor beastspoke me to say it was so slightly tainted as to be clean. As if to emphasize the point, he led the pack to the edge to drink.

  I told the others what he had said as they unloaded the horses, and without hesitation, when the wolves moved away, they went to lave their filthy faces and arms and drank their fill without restraint. I longed to do the same, but my injuries forbade me doing anything more strenuous than sitting and waiting for a bowl of water to be brought to me. Of course, I could not feel any pain, but I did not want any more to be stored in the coercive net than need be.

  I was beginning to feel the heavy tiredness that meant my body was trying to heal my injuries and I was expending energy on the coercive net. I needed to unweave it as soon as possible, for stored pain distilled and continued to do so until released. If it became too potent or there was too much pain stored away, the forbidding might dissolve under the weight of it and flood me, unprepared, with intense pain.

  Analivia brought me a mug of water and a bowl she had filled from the spring. After I had emptied the mug, she bathed my face and good arm in warm water and then fetched fresh water to bathe my broken arm in case there were any cuts that needed treating. She did not remove the splint but worked around it, saying it would not do to disturb the bone, which needed to knit together. I had never had a broken bone before and I wondered how long it would take to heal. Analivia found two cuts, one small and the other long but shallow, and applied some salve she had mixed up. She was so gentle and I was so tired that I began to nod off under her ministrations.

  “I do not like it that you are so sleepy,” she said worriedly. “It is strange, too, that you do not seem to feel any pain.”

  “Do you feel pain when you breathe out?” Ahmedri asked, also looking concerned.

  I shook my head to clear it and said somewhat groggily, “Do not fear for me, my friends. I have been holding off the pain of the broken arm and rib using a coercive net, but it is tiring me. I need to release the pain and then sleep.”

  “Garth spoke of this ability,” Analivia said, sounding fascinated.

  “That is not all,” I said. And at last, in as few words as possible, I told them what the Agyllians had done to my body.

  “But all bodies heal themselves,” Ahmedri said, sounding puzzled.

  “My body heals from things that other bodies do not heal from and I heal far more quickly than normal,” I said.

  “Your chest and arm—” Analivia began.

  “Will heal in a few days. I don’t know what damage that boulder did when it landed on my chest, but although it hurts me, the pain is less fierce than it was. I can tell that much even with the coercive net stopping me feeling it.”

  “What are the limits of this healing ability?” Analivia asked.

  “I don’t know, but I have not reached them yet and I have been more seriously hurt than this. Mind you, I have never broken bones before. The only disadvantage is that the healing is involuntary and it takes all of my energy. I can’t put it off until later. Hence my sleepiness now.”

  “That these birds could teach your body such a thing is astonishing,” Dameon murmured. Then, unexpectedly, the empath laughed softly. “But it explains a good deal. Roland has been mightily puzzled by some of the healing your body has done in the past. I once heard him speculate that you must have some sort of unique self-healing Talent you were not aware of.”

  I took a short, tense breath. “It shames me that I have not told you sooner than this, since it means that all of you risk more than I do in traveling with me. When you thought I was sick in the pipe last night, I was actually exhausted because my body was repairing whatever damage had been done. I was not affected by the taint long enough to become ill from it.”

  Swallow laid a hand on my shoulder. “Elspeth, you must know that you are the only one who truly matters on this venture. The rest of us serve your quest and I, for one, am more than relieved to find you can heal yourself.”

  I was astonished and humbled to see that the others were nodding.

  “Once voices speak in your dreams, it is hard to be skeptical about other wonders,” Dameon said drily, for of course he felt my incredulity at their reactions.

  Now completely wide awake, I licked my lips. “Then perhaps it is time for me to tell you something that will be as hard for you to hear as it was for me. Atthis, who spoke in your dreams, and who has long guided me, is dead. She died soon after sending Maruman and Darga to bring me into the mountains to seek the help of the Brildane.”

  “Dead!” Swallow said. “But how will you know where to go after we have Cassandra’s key?”

  “I hope her successor will tell me,” I said. “Atthis carried the memories of all previous Elders in her mind, and after she died, by some means I cannot understand, all of those memories, Atthis’s included, were lodged in the same high realm where Straaka’s spirit hovers. It was these merged minds that bade him seek me out, even as they wait for the new Elder to encompass them.”

  “But if these merged minds communicated with Straaka, it cannot merely be that they are memories,” Analivia protested.

  “Before Straaka’s spirit spoke to me, I believed that when the body died, the spirit was drawn into the mindstream from which all spirits come and into which all spirits go at the end. But it seems that a spirit can live on in some guise when its flesh dies, and I now believe that it is not the memories of the previous Elders Atthis carried inside her mind but their spirits or part of them.”

  “Can it be possible?” Analivia muttered to herself.

  I looked at Ahmedri. “Until Straaka spoke to me, I believed that Bruna had misunderstood the over-guardian’s words.” I hesitated. “There is one other thing I would tell you, but I lack the strength for another long tale right now.”

  “Then sleep,” Analivia said decisively. “The rest of us can set up camp and make a meal. When we wake you to eat, you can tell us whatever needs telling then.”

  Analivia he
lped me to lie down and covered me with a blanket. I closed my eyes and relaxed as completely as I could, and then I unwove the coercive net and let the pain wash through me. I did not try to resist it, knowing from experience that this would lengthen my suffering. I lifted my mind above my body in the way that I had learned to do, which allowed my body to feel the pain but my mind to perceive that experience as if from afar. When the pain ebbed away, I felt exhausted but light. I was wide awake now despite a fatigue so deep that I felt light-headed. I opened my eyes and gazed up at the scatter of stars above. There was no trace of the heavy cloud cover that had filled the sky as we headed for the graag. The storm must have broken when we were under the earth.

  That brought me to my dream of Rushton in a storm at sea and a different pain washed through me.

  “I wish that our paths need never diverge in even the smallest way,” he had said after loving me, but then he had kissed me gently and gone on along the path away from me. He had been able to walk away because he had believed we would see one another again. So we had, but then I had crept away from him in the night like a thief, and though hidden within him was the knowledge that I had not had any choice, I had done it, knowing I would never see him again.

  Tears forced their way through my closed lids and trickled down my cheeks, and for a moment the grief I felt at having left him was unendurable. For until now, the thought that he had been somewhere in the world, living and breathing and walking in the sunlight, linked to me by a golden spirit cord, had given me a bridge across the abyss of pain and loss that our parting had opened so that I might do what I must do despite knowing what it had cost. But if Rushton truly had died in a storm, I did not know how to bear it.

  I clenched my teeth and told myself fiercely that what I had seen had been only a nightmare borne of being buried alive. It was I who had been dying, not Rushton. Had I not many times had ordinary dreams full of the garbled matter of the day where something irksome or troubling had cavorted, masked in some queer guise?

  I willed myself to sleep, drawing on the dark spirit-force at the depths of my will to sink swift and inviolable through the layers of my mind, but as I came to hover above the mindstream, a bubble of silver dream matter rose so quickly to envelope me, it was almost as if I had summoned it.

  I dreamed of a woman in Land clothes trudging along a black road. White sand lay on either side of the road and across it in some places, and gray Beforetime poles made from some smooth stonelike material rose up at regular intervals beside it.

  At first I thought it was Hannah Seraphim, but although she bore a passing resemblance to the woman I had seen in my past-dream with Cassandra at the Reichler Clinic Reception Center in Newrome, it was not her. The mouth was quite a different shape and the eyes were the wrong color, yet this woman was old, too, with gray hair cut short, and she was leaning heavily on the sort of carved stick some highland herders used. She carried a hempen bag of sticks slung over her shoulder, and I wondered why she did not push them into the thin pack she wore. Belted at her waist was some sort of small Beforetime machine. It was familiar to my eyes and I puzzled at this until it occurred to me that I had seen a similar device drawn in Jacob Obernewtyn’s journal. I was sure he had scribed that it was a machine for locating ground water. Or had it been the device for checking the level of taint in earth and water, which Jacob called contamination?

  I willed myself closer, but instead the dream dissolved and I spilled into another dream that was almost exactly the same as the first except there was less sand on the road. Coming toward me was a tall, thin, older man. He was very erect and had a handsome, rather sad face and blue eyes under a shock of thick white hair. He was pulling a strange cart that seemed to glide along behind him. A small dog ran at his heels.

  Could it be Jacob? I thought.

  As they passed me, the man looked through me, but to my astonishment, the dog’s eyes turned to me and flared white. The shock of it cracked the strange dream apart and I woke.

  I opened my eyes. The sky was a very pale clear blue over a white plain that I could now see rose up some distance away into ghostly white dunes molded with blue shadows. The sun had yet to rise but it was light enough that all but a single star was invisible. The few long thin skeins of violet cloud stretched across a seam of brightness that had opened up along the horizon and I reckoned the sun was minutes from rising.

  My chest still hurt, but the pain was far less intense as I levered myself up carefully with my good arm and looked around. My human companions were curled asleep all around me in blankets, save for Ahmedri. The tribesman sat cross-legged and motionless alongside Dragon’s bier, looking at the lake, but I could not see his expression because he had his back to me.

  “Ahmedri?” I called softly.

  He rose immediately and came over to me. “How do you feel? We tried to wake you to give you some food last night, but you refused to be woken.”

  “My arm aches and my chest still hurts but they are much better than they were,” I croaked.

  “Wait,” he said, and brought me a mug of water.

  “Tell me why you don’t like Miryum?” I asked when I had drunk it.

  The tribesman’s dark face rippled in what might have been a grimace. “It is strange that you should ask that, for I have been sitting here wondering if she came this way with my brother’s bones. Almost I can imagine it.” He was silent for a long moment; then he looked at me, his expression somber. “I had no desire to leave the desert lands or my own people to come to the Land. I blamed my brother for leaving. I blamed the woman who pulled him away from his land and tribe to his doom. We fought before he left to get the woman.”

  “You fought before Straaka came to Obernewtyn?” I asked. Then the meaning of his words came to me. “You fought one another?”

  He nodded grimly. After a moment he said, “I did not want him to go. I told him that his choice of a Land woman was wrong. He would have stood for that, save that I said the woman was unworthy of him. It was an insult against his woman that must be met and I knew it as well as he. I am a stronger and better fighter, but Straaka won. It meant I must retract my words. I told him that I would not and bade him kill me, knowing he would not. Then I cursed him and the woman and rashly bade him go then and die with her.” Ahmedri shook his head, the beads in his hair clinking and clicking. He gazed down at his clenched hands. “When I heard that he died saving her, I hated the woman and my brother, but I hated myself most of all for the things I had said, knowing they could now never be unsaid, knowing I felt them still. I felt as if hate were choking me. When the overguardian appointed me to bring Straaka’s bones back to Sador, I asked why I should be the one to do so, for that task is a high honor and I had shamed myself. I did not deserve it and I knew it, nor did I have any desire to do it. The overguardian agreed that I was unworthy but she said that still I must go and that either I would become worthy of the honor or I would die.”

  I did not know what to say.

  He gave me a penetrating look from under frowning brows. “I did not want anything to do with Landfolk. I thought all who were not Sadorians lacked courage and honor. I came to the Land with Bruna because I had no choice. When you began by evading me, it was no more than I had expected. I thought all Landfolk deceitful. But this journey has opened my eyes to many truths. Seeing the man Moss made monstrous by hatred, I saw myself. Would that I could say this to my brother, but I will never see him again.”

  “You loved him,” I said softly.

  He gave me a look of gratitude so intense it hurt me. “Our mother and father died and there were only us two. I was younger and he cared for me. I worshipped him and I was jealous of his love for the coercer. I feared she would take him from me and she did,” Ahmedri said, and irony was a glitter in his eyes. “I even hated you when you said you had spoken to his spirit. Why not me? I wondered. I must find the woman, Miryum, and wake her. Not only so that I can find my brother’s bones as I was bidden, but also because Straaka lov
ed her.”

  Tears pricked my eyes but I blinked them away and said, “I am so sorry I did not think to tell him you were with me, Ahmedri, else I am sure he would have given me some message for you. If you wish it, and I dream of him again, I will tell him what you have told me.”

  “I would be … in your debt, Elspeth,” the tribesman said huskily. It was the first time he had said my name.

  “You are awake!” Analivia cried, throwing aside her blanket to come over to me. “Are you healed?”

  “Not completely, but I am a good deal better than I was. Ahmedri has been telling me that you tried to wake me.”

  She nodded. “We were worried until Faraf signaled Dameon to say you were only sleeping deeply. In truth we were all exhausted, so we decided to eat and do the same. The wolves left. The pack leader told Darga they will hunt and then sleep in the daytime. They will come back at dusk.” She glanced at Ahmedri and then at Swallow and Dameon, who were also rising. “The wolf told Darga that if we wished, we could set off and they would follow us, but we thought it would be better to wait here for them and give you more time to rest and recover.”

  I was anxious to continue, yet it was true that I would heal faster if we stayed where we were even for a day, and I had no desire to set off into the desert without our guides. I told her that it had been the right decision and we broke our fast with the cold food that had been prepared. Analivia apologized for the poor fare, explaining that they had not dared to light a cookfire in case we needed the torches to drive off the rhenlings. I was puzzled until he explained that the torches were the only remaining fuel aside from a few firenuts.