The Red Queen (85 page)

I sighed. ‘I have told you why I do not think that wise, but also, as Ana said, you must think of your people, too. Most likely Matthew and those of your people who have been yearning for your coming will have a plan for how best to reveal you, so as to ensure as little bloodshed as possible when they turn on their masters and set you on your throne. We need to make contact with them so they can help you to reveal yourself to your people safely, so that all are ready to rise against the Gadfians. If you come in with me now, you risk disrupting those plans.’

Dragon looked crestfallen. I took her hands in mine. ‘Dear one, it is difficult to be the instrument of fate, I know,’ I murmured.

Compassion replaced melancholy in her lovely face and she pulled her hands free and flung her arms around me, hugging me tightly. ‘I will never be as brave and strong and wise as you, Elspeth,’ she whispered. ‘I fear my people will be horrified and disappointed once they see what I truly am.’

‘And what are you truly but their long-awaited queen?’ I demanded.

‘Before you found me, I lived alone in the ruins and made monsters with my fears. I am not queenly!’

I laughed, hugging her. ‘Darling Dragon, you
are
the queen here and therefore whatever you do is queenly. And you are far braver and stronger than I was as a child. My life was easy compared to what you survived, and for a good bit of it I had two loving parents and a brother. You were washed ashore on the West Coast as little more than a baby – I am still baffled as to
how
you managed it! You had to survive a shipwreck, the betrayal and murder of your mother and all those years living alone in the ruins. As to wisdom, that is a hard thing to get, and it is never wholly won like some moon-fair trophy. You have the beginnings of it, and more will come so long as you live and strive.’

It took far longer than I had expected to go into Redport, and when I did, I was a good way further to the south that my intended entry point.

I began by striking directly towards the settlement, angling slightly south, so that I would avoid the silver tracks. Clouds were still covering the moon, and aside from being irritated at having to walk slowly in order not to stumble into a crack, I was glad of the shifty light, since it would prevent anyone who might glance out of the settlement from seeing me. But just when I was close enough to see the buildings and streets clearly, the clouds overhead parted and the waxing moon shone its light down very brightly.

Maruman, draped about my neck, glared up at it with his single good eye and uttered a long, low, baleful growl.

I was less concerned by his irrational loathing of the moon than by the danger of being spotted, and immediately took refuge in the nearest crack in the ground that would hold me. By my reckoning it would not be long before the moon set, and I decided to wait to enter Redport until then. Not that I had seen any sign of life. Most inhabitants must be abed, but still it seemed to me that Redport was
too
quiet. Perhaps there was a curfew in place – hadn’t there been some mention of such a thing in one of my true dreams of Matthew?

I began to fancy the whole place was deserted, until I chided myself for a fool, because Fey had seen people; I had seen them moving about the streets in her visions. I had seen fires from the top of the dome, and Fey had seen immense fires, which someone had obviously lit and then extinguished.

Again I wondered what they signified.

Dragon had said that during her mother’s time, fires were lit during celebrations, but as the others had asked, why would the Gadfian slavemasters allow a Redland celebration? It might be that they had usurped Redland practices as a way of asserting their authority, as I had suggested. They also might have permitted the Redlanders a celebration for the same reason that they had allowed the frieze of the Red Queen to remain intact: as a way of reminding them that their own queen had forbidden them to act against the invaders until her return. The Gadfians would have no fear of that, of course, for they knew she was dead and could never return.

Fleetingly I considered the possibility that Redport was no longer in the hands of the Gadfians – that the fires had been lit by the Redlanders to celebrate their freedom. Dragon had not returned but perhaps someone had dreamed of her coming, and managed to convince the rest it was a true dream. Or maybe Matthew had managed to convince the Redlanders that their queen was truly coming and that they should free her land for her.

I turned my thoughts firmly from speculation to my immediate future. The first thing I had to discover was if Redport was still in Gadfian hands, and if so, I must try to get some idea of its power structure. There must be soldierguards of some type, and I would need to learn where they resided, how they divided their watch and where they kept prisoners. I wanted to locate the palace island, partly in case it was, as I suspected, the seat of Gadfian power, but more importantly, because it might be the location of Luthen’s crypt.

Above all else, I needed to find out what Cassandra had left here for the Seeker, and just in case it was not on the island, I needed to remain open to whatever guidance the fates might offer me. It was monstrously irksome that the mysterious block prevented me from using my Talents to probe people – it would have been by far the best and safest way to gather information.

It occurred to me that I might farseek the others to see if the block inhibited my abilities so close to Redport. I farsought Swallow atop the dome without difficulty, and told him I had decided to wait until moonset to enter the settlement. He thought it wise, saying somewhat alarmingly that he had been able to see me clearly every time the moon shone and knew exactly where I was now. Of course he had known I was there and had been watching me cross open ground, nevertheless it confirmed my decision to wait, no matter how quiet it seemed.

The only news he had to offer otherwise was that Faraf and Sendari had returned from their foray and had found sparse but acceptable grazing on the high ground, but no source of surface water and no crops. They had, however, found a funaga settlement of some sort in what sounded like the base of a great round depression. Swallow had been unable to get much detail from the beasts because of the difficulty of rendering what they had seen into signal speech.

‘But there were definitely no crops?’ I asked.

‘None at all,’ Swallow reiterated. ‘In fact the high ground is essentially bare of all greenery and growth but the meanest kind. It seems a good many people do live in this settlement, however from what the beasts said, they live in caves. That seems unlikely. From up here, I can make out a path or road that leads to it but I can’t see the settlement itself. Darga has gone to have a closer look, because the horses saw at least two dogs there, so he can get into it without exciting attention.

I tried and failed to locate Darga but I farsought Sendari and saw in his mind the place they had discovered from a distance. It looked more like an excavation than a natural depression, but it was immense and deep, and it did seem that people must dwell in caves cut into the edges of the depression, since there were no buildings anywhere.

I withdrew into my own mind, thinking that the most important thing to take from this was that there was likely to be traffic between the two settlements, so that if my foray into Redport prevented me farseeking or coercing anyone, I would still have the opportunity to use my Talent on travellers passing to and from Redport. I could even deeply coerce someone so that I could make use of them within Redport, even when I was unable to reach into their mind.

I turned onto my stomach and studied the terrain between my hiding place and the buildings along the outer rim. The ground looked smoother and firmer, as if it was part of the original level rather than the fallen plain. I had a view down two narrow lanes. To enter the settlement by them would probably lead me into the labyrinth of smaller streets that lay between the larger spoke streets. In one way that would be good, since it was unlikely I would meet any sort of soldierguard, but getting out of the tangle might take time. I decided to move closer to one of the spoke streets while I waited for the moon to set.

When cloud once more covered the face of the moon, I climbed out of the crack and sprinted to a depression further south. The moon shone again even as I reached it and flung myself into it, ignoring Maruman’s grumbling. I was facing an unbroken row of buildings with neither doors nor windows. I moved again and then again, each time waiting until clouds dimmed the light of the moon, moving always south. I soon found the ground began to slope up as I had speculated, and so I ignored the first wide spoke street I came to, and continued working my way south. I wanted to see if I could get high enough to see the bay and the ships anchored there. This close, I might be able to see if any of them was the
Black Ship
. With luck, I might even be able to locate the palace island.

Now that I was on higher ground, I could see that the sails erected atop many of the flat-roofed buildings were in fact woven shade awnings, stretched over chairs and tables. That the inhabitants of Redport used their roofs as living spaces struck me as both strange and wonderfully practical. Shadowed by the awnings, a person on a roof would get the benefit of any breeze that blew, as well as having a splendid view of the bay.

I had also noticed that many of the buildings in this part of the settlement were freestanding and surrounded by high walls rather than built side by side in rows. The sight niggled at my mind until I remembered that Dardelan’s father, Bodera, had dwelt in such a building and the Herders had built walls about their cloisters too; I wondered if this had been a custom in one of the Beforetime lands.

Maruman had tired of my lurching and had leapt down to follow me at a huffy and dignified pace the next time I moved. I passed another row of buildings standing side by side, and noted that, as with most of the others, there were no doors and few or no windows. Those windows that did face the plain were both small and high. The buildings would have been grim if not for the fact that many of the walls had tiled patterns and various other idiosyncratic decorative protuberances. There were also statues here and there on plinths. I felt sure these had been created in the time of the Red Queens for I could not imagine Gadfians caring about such things.

It struck me suddenly that I thought of them as bloodthirsty warriors, yet I had never actually met a Gadfian man or woman. All I knew of them came from the reports of others. The Sadorians told of the Gadfians on ships who had ruthlessly stolen women from Sador, but that had been one group of them, and for all their brutality, they had been driven by desperation. Yet those who dwelt in the untainted land they called New Gadfia had supposedly thrived and they still traded in slaves and had invaded the Red Land. And why had they agreed to supply a vast slave army to the emissary from the land of the white-faced lords? Was that Ariel’s doing, as I had sometimes suspected? And how exactly had he inveigled himself into the midst of the Gadfians? Was it simply coercion?

I turned my thoughts to the enslaved population of Redland.

My own dreams and the dream-books indicated most of them did not dwell in prisons or compounds or with their Gadfian masters. Instead, they were permitted to live in dwellings of their own, like free people, and tend to their own needs just as they had done before the invasion, only they must also submit to the requirements of their masters. As far as I could understand, the majority of them had been pushed into one part of Redport, and my guess, based on what I had seen from the top of the dome, was that most slaves dwelt in the crowded northernmost portion of the settlement, where I had noticed a few steep-roofed buildings like those in the Land, for of course there were many slaves that were not Redlanders here.

When I had first learned these things about Redport, sitting in my tower room or in guildmerge, I had thought the slaves of the Red Land differed little from Landfolk under the tyrannical rule of the Herders and the Council, given that they lived in their own houses and tended to their own needs, but now, lying in a dark crevice on the threshold of Redport, I realised there were vital differences between being slaves and being free men and women. Landfolk, while oppressed, had not been sold like loaves of bread at a market. They had not been
owned
and they had some rights even under Council law. Slaves had no rights at all.

Thinking of slavery made me wonder what had happened to those slaves who had been amassed here for the emperor’s army. I knew the Gadfians had tried to buy slaves to fulfil their bargain, after the rebels had taken over the Land, cutting off the supply of potential slaves, but why had they not simply used the enslaved Redlanders? Presumably there had not been enough of them, or perhaps the Gadfians had not wanted to give up their passive slave population because it would empty Redport and leave no workforce for the mines. Certainly the mines were worked hard and I supposed their produce sold for a good profit, or maybe it was sent back to New Gadfia. Securing the mine output might, in fact, be one of the chief reasons Redport had been invaded.

The Gadfians’ plan to invade the Land, Sador and the Norse Isles to take by force the slaves they needed had been thwarted, presumably somehow because of the four ships setting out from those lands to come to Redport. So the futuretellers had predicted, and it must be so, else Ariel would never have travelled to the distant land of the white-faced lords to offer a weaponmachine to replace the promised slave army, as Dragon’s dream had showed.

I had no doubt the weaponmachine Ariel had offered was Sentinel and I was equally certain that Ariel would never give such power over to the white-faced lords. Probably he judged that once Sentinel and BOT were in his hands, the white-faced lords’ mastery of Beforetime weapons and devices would cease to be a threat.
He
would hold the balance of power because he would control the most terrible weapon.