The Red Queen (50 page)

This led me to think of Lidge, the Misfit baby who had bound Gilaine and a number of other mismatched Talented Misfits to him by coerced love.

Tash interrupted my thoughts to ask diffidently if I would like to try some jam she had made from preserved plums, for it went well with the bread Ana was now slicing, so I gathered she had lost the battle. I accepted the little pot, taking a slice of bread and spreading it with jam. Biting into it, I told her indistinctly that she had certainly mastered the art of making food taste good, and she smiled and thanked me with a little flush of pleasure. I wished I might break through the wall of reserve she had thrown up and tell her what I was trying to achieve, but I did not want to speak of it aloud, and her mind had turned out to be naturally shielded. In any case, it was better not to speak of anything until I was sure it was possible. Once I was sure God would allow her to remain awake, I would get her up on the surface by some pretext and then, remembering to set aside my golator, I would ask her what she wanted to do.

Seeing me glance from Tash to the device, Ana said softly when the girl had moved away that she would not offer golators to the others just yet, because they would not work on Tash, and it would remind her that God regarded her differently from the rest of us. I thought Tash knew very well how God regarded her, but I asked why a golator would not work on her if it worked on us.

‘The implant,’ Ana said softly. ‘It would interfere with the golator because it serves the same purpose. I know it because yesterday when Dragon and I were coming back from seeing Miryum, and wondering where Tash was, God said
she
could tell us because the implant meant she would always know her location.’ Suddenly Ana froze, her eyes going beyond me, and I turned to see what had startled her to silence.

There at the end of the passage stood Swallow, looking weary and filthy but also triumphant. Beside him stood a tall, lean Ahmedri in ragged clothes. Aside from the scar and the shock of white in his hair, the tribesman’s dark, handsome face was otherwise little changed. But his threadbare clothing revealed an emaciated body covered in long-healed scars.

‘Ahmedri!’ I gasped, getting to my feet.

‘It is good to see you, Elspeth Gordie,’ the tribesman said in his deep resonant voice. ‘Swallow told me it seemed to him four turns of the moon since I went to search for water, but I must tell you at once that it has been nineteen turnings of the moon since last we spoke.’

I felt as if he had hit me in the stomach, for it meant God had held us in sleep for over a year!

Ahmedri went on. ‘Forgive me, I see that is a shock to you, and we have much to speak about, but Swallow told me of these sleep pods where you were laid by the machine men. The andrones. He said my brother’s woman lies in one among many, and cannot be located, and also that her mind is lost in a dream of madness that she cannot break. It is hard and strange to hear such things as these, but I would see the place where she lies.’

‘I have better news than Swallow gave you,’ I said. ‘Dameon found Miryum by using his empathy and then he and I entered her dream and broke it.’ I hesitated, suddenly remembering the Endrax virus and trying to think of how to speak of it, but Swallow caught my eye and nodded gravely, signifying that he had told the tribesman of the sickness. Ahmedri had not mentioned it, perhaps because his care was all for his brother’s spirit, though he had sworn an oath to care about Miryum for Straaka’s sake. Had he forgotten?

‘It will take some time for her to wake from such a long sleep, and longer still for her to be able to move and talk,’ Ana said, unselfconsciously taking the tribesman’s big scarred hands in hers. Beyond them, I caught a complex fleeting look cross Swallow’s face, and wondered if he was so indifferent to her as I had always supposed.

‘But Elspeth can talk to her mind as soon as she wakes,’ Dragon said and gave the big Sadorian a fierce hug, telling him she was very glad he was not dead. I wondered uneasily what God made of Dragon’s words, and if it would regard me differently or try to capture me and put me in a cryopod if I said outright that I had the powers that would cause it to regard me as a special anomaly.

Ahmedri laughed. ‘I am glad of it too, little one. It is good to see all of you,’ he added, and his eyes ran over us, but came back to rest on Ana again, and then he seemed to me to examine her face searchingly before saying, ‘You all look well.’

‘What happened to your face?’ Ana asked, reaching out to touch his scar lightly and then the white blaze in his hair.

‘A desert beast clawed me,’ he said indifferently. ‘A foul thing that burrows through the sand as a snake through water, so that you do not see it coming. A mutation. But I will not speak of it now. It is part of a longer tale, and though I have heard some of yours from Swallow, I require a full and proper telling.’ He looked at me again. ‘But you will want to know about the others. I do not know where any of them are, not even Darga and Falada, who were with me when I left you.’

‘You must eat before anything else,’ I said, worried by his thinness. ‘Unless you want to bathe and sleep and eat before talking further?’

He smiled. ‘It is good of you to ask when you must hunger for details, but what
I
hunger for right now is some of the bread I can smell and some water, if there is no ferment to be had.’

Dragon led a shyly smiling Tash forward, saying, ‘There is no ferment, but I bet Tash could make some. It is she who made the bread. She helped us in Habitat and we brought her out with us because the others would have killed her otherwise. And Ana said you will take her back to Obernewtyn when you have got Straaka’s bones, on your way to Sador to bury them.’

Ahmedri bowed over Tash’s hand. ‘Swallow has told me of you, child. I think it is because of you that my friends are safe.’

Tash smiled shyly. ‘It is because of them that
I
am safe,’ she said softly.

Ana gave me an apologetic look but happily the other girl was so entranced by the tall, exotic-looking tribesman that she seemed not to have heard Dragon’s words about her going to the Land. Then Dragon told him that quite aside from bread, Tash had prepared a whole feast to welcome him.

‘Then I would be glad to eat though I fear I will devour it like a starving wolf after all this time with no company other than beasts.’

Tash said that she did not know what a wolf was but that she would love to eat with beasts for company.

‘Oh, wait until you see Maruman, and Gahltha! Oh and Rasial!’ Dragon cried.

Tash gave Dragon a grave, tender smile, and I suddenly felt sure they had discussed what might happen to her at length, and Tash had seen what Dragon did not – that God would not allow her to leave Midland. Yet she must at least be permitted to go up to the surface, even if she had to remain within Midland. I would think on how to ensure that. The thought that she would remain here in the darkness for some unknown length of time, perhaps forever, could not be borne. Any other person would have railed at the unfairness, but being Speci had taught Tash obedience and passivity, so she had learned to accept what must be. If she were to be put to sleep, even nullified, she would accept that too.

I resolved to find out that night what God had learned from its mistakes, and whether I could use that knowledge to win Tash a measure of freedom.

Once he had been given a piled plate of food and a mug of water, there being no ferment, Ahmedri ate hungrily for some time, then over a second plate, bowing gracefully to the earnest pleading of Ana and Dragon, he told us his story in between occasional bites. His tale, while long, was not dull, for Ahmedri had a compelling way of relating his story. It was a gift all Sadorians shared because the tribes, eschewing scribing, remembered things from the past by telling and retelling until their stories achieved the resonance and rhythm of song.

‘I returned to our camp following the long night of the sandstorm, having found neither water nor any sign of the mysterious stone trees that were meant to lead us to Jacob’s dream city,’ he began. ‘It was empty of life. All of you had vanished without leaving any tracks. Nor did any of the other beasts remain, not even the she-wolf Descantra, who had been wounded and unconscious when I left. But there were a muddle of paw and hoof prints leading away to the north. The only other tracks were the enormous and very strange tracks of a single person, leading east.

‘I decided the tracks must belong to one of the shining beings we had heard about, which the wolves call
efari
, and that it had taken all of you but none of the animals.’ Ahmedri added that although this was his theory, he had been unable to imagine
how
we had been taken captive, for there were no tracks other than those of what he now knew to be an androne nor any wheel tracks or sled marks to suggest we had been taken away in a vehicle. He had remained that night and all the next day, hoping the beasts would return, for there was a remote possibility that we had ridden on horseback, though the tracks did not support that theory. He had not lit a fire, wanting to save the little fuel he had for cooking, and he thought himself fortunate in that decision, for the next night, a great long cloudy column of
rhenlings
passed high overhead, and because he showed no light, they did not swoop down to attack him.

‘At that time I regretted that I had no fire, for then I believed the
rhenlings
feared light, and that fire would protect me. In fact all light causes the creatures, and indeed all mutants, pain, but it is more complex than that they simply fear it. They fear and utterly shun sunlight and the light of a full bright moon. But any lesser light, though loathsome to them, makes them wroth if they are swarming and come upon it. If they can, they attack it. In truth they will throw themselves into it and quench it at the cost of their own lives once they are swarming. But I leap ahead of myself. That first night in the empty camp, I felt only that I had been a fool not to have a fire ready.’

The following day, Darga and Falada tried to track the beasts. Ahmedri set off after sunrise, travelling in the direction of the footprints of the
efari
, the three of them planning to rejoin one another the following day. The marks left by the androne had been faint, often vanishing altogether, for time had passed and the sand did not long hold prints, but he went always in the same direction. ‘When you are desert-born, there is no reason not to go directly to your destination where there is no obstacle to make you change direction, and so it was with my quarry. I came again and then again to the footprints and always and ever the trail led straight on.

‘Ironically, at late afternoon on that first day after I left the camp, I found the water I had searched so hard for but had somehow missed. A small oasis. I decided to make camp there for a night, for there was food that could be foraged. Foolishly, after bathing and slaking my thirst, I fell asleep. I had misjudged my exhaustion and failed to fix my mind on a time to wake, so I slept until I woke naturally. It was dark, even the stars were blacked out by cloud and I hastened to light a fire. It had only just caught when
rhenlings
swarmed. I guessed they had a roosting place close by, for they were low and close to the ground when they appeared, as if they had just emerged from a crack or rift.’ The tribesman’s face was serene but I saw that his fists were clenched and the knuckles bloodless. ‘They were on me almost at once. Pure instinct had me dive into the water and immerse myself save for my nose and eyes and my knife hand. They did not like the water but they knew I was there and they attacked over and over before finally giving up and flying away. Even so, I did not dare come out until it was dawn, lest they be lurking nearby. I dragged myself from the water and slept like a stone, only taking the time to ready the fire to be relit at a moment’s notice. I thought the fire had been too small to drive them off, just being lit. Untended, it had long since gone out, which was just as well because the wood would otherwise have been wasted. Unfortunately, I had been scratched or maybe it was something in the water . . . The scratches became swiftly inflamed and I felt the beginnings of fever as I set the fire anew. I just had wits enough about me to slather the bites with a salve I carry before I sank into a black stupor and dreamed many strange dreams, sometimes waking to see queer visions.’

There had been moments of clarity, Ahmedri said, and in one of them, feeling icy cold, he had groped for something to cover himself and found the light silver plast blanket I had brought down from the observing house in the mountains. I stopped him to ask if he had got it from our abandoned camp and he said that there had been a few things left, mostly covered over with sand, and he had brought them with him. I wanted to ask about the stone sword but I held my tongue, not wanting to interrupt the tale more than I had done, and also feeling he would have said if he had brought the heavy stone sword with him.

Despite its strange light stiffness, he went on, the silver blanket kept him remarkably warm, and when he woke at last, he was no more than pleasantly warm, though it was midday and blazing hot. Later he realised the silver blanket had some sort of heat blocking power, as well as the ability to keep it in. Still fevered, he had draw in his singed head and slipped back to sleep.

This time he dreamed of Straaka.

‘My brother came to me and told me that death was my shadow now. All ways led to death, he said, but one. He bade me turn more easterly, saying there was a settlement there where I would be safe and could recover from the poisons that coursed through me. There was water, and though it was not without danger, he would show me where to bide. I asked if I could not go directly to the place where his woman lay imprisoned in sleep, but he said it was too far and I was very ill. I asked about the rest of you and he said you had been taken there as well but if I sought you out at once, I would travel too slowly and perish from lack of food and water, if the
rhenlings
did not kill me first. I must go where he bade me go, if I had ever loved him and thought of him as my brother.’