The Red Queen (74 page)

‘Hendon, why is the glide changing its course?’ I asked.

‘The glide instruments detect contaminated emanations from the ground directly ahead that would impair the glide computermachine.’

An hour later we were still proceeding in the same direction. That was the longest we had ever diverted, which meant the tainted region the glide detected was very large. Ahead I could just make out the jagged black outline of the mountains marching north. God’s map showed the range marched all the way to the end of the land, even as had the map I had been shown long ago in a map chamber aboard a Sadorian ship. Beyond them lay the sea, but we were flying too low to see it, nor could I detect any break. Of course there might be one, visible and accessible from a different angle.

Eventually, the glide was close enough for me to see the highest mountains were swathed in white at the summit. Ana joined me, hair wet and cheeks flushed. I was impressed that she had managed to wash her hair in the tiny water bowl in the relieving room, but she said absently that she had found a bathing closet similar to the transparent bathing box in the residence of Kelver Rhonin.

Despite my concern about the mountains, I had her show me the bathing closet and made use of it, for my hair and body were itching with grime. I came out to find we had almost reached the first of the outlying mountains in the range. There were gaps enough that the glide could weave between them, but when I asked Ana, she said Hendon insisted we were still simply evading tainted terrain, and that God’s direction was to go north.

When Swallow appeared with wet hair, he explained regretfully that he had made use of the closet but that it seemed to have run out of water, then he broke off to stare at the mountains ahead, asking abruptly, ‘Oughtn’t Hendon to be taking us higher?’

Ana assured us that Hendon had said he could change course if the glide instrumentation picked up that it was endangered, so it must be that there was no danger. ‘The only thing he can’t do is to change the final destination.’

‘What if we are supposed to continue west?’ Swallow asked. ‘There is no way we will get through those central peaks at this height.’

‘Hendon has all sorts of ways of getting information besides merely looking,’ Ana answered. ‘Maybe he sees a way through that line of high mountains. Maybe we are
not
to continue north.’

‘Can’t Hendon just tell you where we are to go in advance?’ I asked.

‘He says that he is only able to know God’s instructions one order at a time,’ Ana said. ‘It has something do with the fact that he was never meant to use the instructions, so they are all somehow bundled up to be given to the Northport computer.’

‘In other words, we must trust Hendon,’ Swallow said, suddenly smiling. To my surprise Ana flushed and looked away from him. Before I could do more than wonder at the interplay of emotions between them, the glide turned smoothly, cutting narrowly through a misty canyon between two lower mountains and then weaving heart-stoppingly between a series of peaks until it was flying north again, this time along a gap between the high ridgeline of the central snow-capped peaks, and the stony peaks that formed the ridge that bounded the eastern edge of the massive range.

‘Ye gods,’ Swallow muttered as the glide evaded a broken spike of stone, and then we were winding perilously through a forest of spikes. Ana went again to ask Hendon what was happening, and returned rather breathlessly to say the glide was unable to go north as God required, because the plain was too badly contaminated; it would destroy the ship computer’s memory banks, and its own as well. Hence Hendon had chosen to turn the glide north within the range.

‘He says he expects it will stay level even if he must go around things, but that there is bad weather coming, so we had better get the beasts secured and sit down,’ she said.

Swallow and I tended to fastening the horses in their nets, and Ana went to the wolves, while Dragon put away everything we had got out in the galley and closed the wall over the eating chamber, locking it in place. By the time Swallow and I emerged from the hold, all of the others had taken seats in the row of chairs before the control bench. Swallow took the seat beside Ana and I gathered my courage and belted myself into the empty chair beside Dragon. Maruman was on Dameon’s lap, but he immediately walked over Ana and Dragon to sit on my lap.

‘Faithless thing,’ Dragon laughed.

We had got into place just in time, for moments later a blizzard blew up, or we flew into it, and suddenly all the screen and windows showed was a tumultuous whiteness. The glide slowed, and was lashed and battered, shuddering and creaking alarmingly. Suddenly, heart-stoppingly, it dropped, then dropped again, but despite all of this, it flew steadfastly on, moving left and right to avoid obstacles that we could barely see even when we were passing them. After the first terrifying moments, we realised the androne or the glide clearly knew what obstacles lay ahead, regardless of the snow and mist. It was frightening, but as the day wore on, all of us, even I, sat riveted, occasionally gasping and holding our breaths when stone spikes or snow-clad peaks appeared in front of us or close beside us, then disappeared. It was impossible to converse properly. No doubt the others felt as I did, that it was only my own rigid attention that kept us safe.

It was afternoon by my reckoning, when at last the glide turned hard to the east. There was no obstacle ahead that I could see, but the glide continued east, until suddenly we passed through a gap in the low ridge that bounded the eastern side of the range and out of the blizzard. Almost at once, the glide turned north again, so that we were again flying parallel to the range. Under us, once again, lay Blacklands, though presumably they were not as badly tainted as what had gone before.

‘An endless desolation,’ I murmured, as Swallow got up, stretching luxuriantly, and went to prepare some food. I realised suddenly that I was ravenous.

‘I will help you,’ I said, passing Maruman to Dameon, for Dragon was getting up, too.

‘The Desolation is an apt name, given the feelings that it rouses in all of you,’ Dameon said softly.

‘It is not just the destruction but the sheer
scale
of it,’ I said. ‘It feels as if we have been flying over it for years and will be doing so for years to come.’

‘It must come to an end,’ Dameon said.

There was an odd note to his voice, but Swallow called out to me to come and help him unlatch the galley wall, and by the time I had done so, Dameon had moved to the back of the glide, carrying Maruman, and seemed to be speaking to Gavyn. I had offered my help to Swallow, but Ana said that she would help. She needed to get away from the window for a while. We had all been sitting at the front of the vessel, eyes fixed to the screen during the blizzard, and it would be no wonder if she wanted a break, though I thought it more likely than she wanted to be close to Swallow. It truly delighted me to see their feelings for one another flowering despite the danger and trials of my quest. In Ana’s case, it was time she had some true joy, and with her, and maybe because of her as much as because of our journey, Swallow had lost the edge of hard cynicism that had always marked him before.

I yawned and decided to go and investigate the bed niches the others had spoken of so enthusiastically, since it would likely be an hour before any food was ready. The beds turned out to be little more than human-sized shelves that could be pulled out, but it would be good to lie flat instead of half sitting as we had to do in the bed chairs in the main chamber. I rolled onto one of them awkwardly and felt suffocated and cramped until I closed my eyes. Then I felt the softness of the mattress under me and how wonderfully dark and quiet it was, for there were no windows in the passage and only a soft rose light coming from low on the walls.

I slept at once, and slipped into a dream in which Gilaine stood before a mirror, clad in a gorgeous red robe of Sadorian silk with long trailing sleeves that hung to the ground. An older, taller, very voluptuous woman with red-brown skin and dark hair turned strangely and strikingly yellow at the ends, was combing Gilaine’s moon-white hair. She wore a red dress as well, though it was shaped differently to Gilaine’s. Her eyes and the shape of her face were so like those of the statue Cassandra had made of her dead bondmate, Luthen, that I had no doubt she was of Redland stock. Dragon had a hint of the same shape to her eyes but her skin was much paler, perhaps because she had lived a good deal of her life in the cold and mists of the mountain valley of Obernewtyn, where the sun never shone more than warm, or maybe because of her unknown father.

‘We will be offered at a ball to honour the emissary,’ the woman said to Gilaine. ‘It will be a masked ball, for in the land of the emissary it is considered bad taste for people to show their emotions, and many wear masks. It is said that only the white-faced emperor and those of his blood have the self-control to wear paint instead of masks, for they have trained their faces to reveal no emotion or thought at all, save by their express will.’

Gilaine reached up to touch her hand.

‘We are to be veiled when we are brought to the emissary,’ said a blonde woman drawing near. She looked like a Norselander and she, too, wore a red gown, but hers bared her shoulders. ‘He will unveil us as the gifts we are, and choose which of us he likes.’

‘If the white-faced lords are so frightened by emotion, I will weep and wail and tear out my hair when he unwraps
me
, that he may reject me,’ said a striking, tempestuous woman with a great cloud of curling brown hair, flouncing closer. Her accent told me that she was Landborn and she also wore a gown of red silk.

‘The white-faced emperor will surely offer us a better life in his court than we should have with the slavemasters if we are rejected,’ said a slender woman with red-brown skin and strangely contrasting white hair who came to look into a mirror standing by the wall. Her hair rose in a beaded and plaited tower upon her head, and the red dress she wore had a beaded bodice.

‘We do not know if it is the emissary to whom we are gifted, or his master, which is not the emperor but the brother of the emperor,’ one of the other women said.

‘I heard this emissary is an ancient and serves the sister or wife of the emperor,’ another said.

‘I do not care which of them would have me. I would rather be the plaything of a known monster than of an unknown one in a distant land,’ said the woman with the cloud of curls. ‘I have a monster picked out for myself, already half tamed.’

‘You think you can tame a slavemaster?’ asked a pretty Redland woman with close-cropped light-brown hair, dusting her cheeks with a golden powder. Her gown was shaped to bare her back. ‘They do not admire spirit, Neeve. Not like some Landmen or our own Redland men. Slavemasters require women to be tame and to breed. They do not take pleasure in their pleasure. Even the women of their own kind, who some have brought here, are treated as possessions, taken straight to the houses of their masters and never seen again. Remain here and you will be the possession of your monster and not even a valued one, no matter what he tells you now.’

‘You do not know what goes on inside their walled compounds or in their beds,’ said the one called Neeve haughtily. ‘None of us knows since all of us are prized precisely because we are pure. My master will command a high price of my monster for all he flutters his eyes at me and whispers to me to come to him in secret or beg my master to sell me cheaply to him. I do not hear him because I know my value.’

‘You are a fool,’ said a very dark-skinned, dark-haired woman in a red sheath with hair like a fall of black silk and long pointed nails stained gold at the ends. She was very tall and she looked more Sadorian than anything else. ‘If your purity is all that is valuable it will be gone as soon as your new master takes possession of you.’

Neeve gave her a sulky look, but declined to reply. Maybe she feared the other woman’s claws. Instead she turned to Gilaine. ‘I do not know why the slavemasters offer
you
, little mouse. You have no great beauty of face and though your hair is lovely, will it compensate for your inability to coo? And what if the slavemasters discover you are a mutant as well as mute?’

A slap rang out and the big woman who had administered it said in a soft, dangerous voice, ‘Do not speak of such matters in the hearing of the slavemasters, Neeve, lest you find your throat slit one fine dark night. Unlike these slavemasters and your Land barbarians, we of the Red Land have always revered those with such abilities as Gilaine possesses. Did not such powers run in the blood of the Red Queens?’

‘Yet they did not save her,’ Neeve hissed.

‘She was betrayed, which is what makes us loathe traitors more than thieves and murderers,’ said the big woman, laying down her comb and sitting down beside Gilaine. She gave Neeve a direct look of dislike. ‘Know that if Gilaine is betrayed to the slavemasters, she will be given to the foul Lord Ariel. If that happens, I swear by the Red Queen that my own knife will find the throat of whoever spoke the word.’

‘I will not betray her or any woman to that wicked man,’ Neeve snapped, two spots of colour riding high upon her cheeks. ‘How dare you even suggest it. I say only that the white-faced lords may learn what she is of their own accord and complain about it to the slavemasters. As to the Red Queen, she is a fool’s dream. Those who speak of her coming have listened too much to Matthew’s prating.’

‘I have noticed
you
listening avidly enough to him, Neeve,’ said the women with the waterfall of black hair, her tone full of amused malice. ‘Though perhaps it is his mouth rather than his words that fascinates you.’

Neeve bared her teeth and flounced away and the other woman laughed. Gilaine touched the arm of the blonde-haired woman, her expression anxious. The big woman gave the dark-haired woman a pointed look and she sighed and sat down on the other side of Gilaine.

‘I don’t mean to goad her, little one, truly I do not, but her spite makes my blood boil. All her nastiness towards you comes from envy over your friendship with the handsome Matthew.’

Gilaine reached out to touch her and after a listening pause, she laughed. ‘I know you love your long-lost Daffyd, and Neeve knows it, too. Maybe that is what irks her most of all, that you have no desire for
Matthew
despite how he feels for you.’ Gilaine shook her head but the other woman patted her hand. ‘It does not matter what the truth is. She assumes that Matthew will have no woman to his bed because he is pining for you, and she is not alone in that assumption.’ She gave Gilaine an arch, enquiring look. ‘Are you sure it is not so?’

Gilaine shook her head decisively.

‘Well,’ said the big woman with a shrug, ‘we must keep an eye on Neeve. She meant what she just said about not doing anything that would see you sent to Ariel, but she is very jealous.’ She paused as Gilaine looked at her, clearly farseeking, and I realised she was not touching the other woman, which meant she had learned to exert her talent without touch. I wondered fleetingly what had become of Lidge and Saul and Gilaine’s nasty sister, Erin.

‘I do not know what to say,’ the big woman said in response to whatever Gilaine had farspoken to her. ‘If you are chosen there is no doubt you will be taken to the land of the white-faced lords. But maybe it is as Tuala said, and these white-faced lords will be kind and civil. I have never heard of them behaving violently or brutally to anyone. But I promise that if this happens, we will make sure word of your fate will come to the ears of your Daffyd, if ever he comes.’

The sound of a breathy horn made all of the women turn to the door. Moments later a very young man entered struggling under the weight of a covered basket. He set it down with a bow and said in a voice that cracked and squeaked, ‘Jewels to be worn for the presentation. You are to choose one apiece.’

The dark-haired woman and her blonde friend hurried to look into the basket, but Gilaine got up and crossed to a narrow window in the wall. Standing on the tips of her toes she could just look out, and over her shoulder I saw a wide blue bay where many ships were anchored, and in their midst was the huge augmented bulk of the
Black Ship
.