The Red Queen (87 page)

I tried to make up my mind what to do. If I went down to the shore of the bay, I might very well learn where the Palace Island was, and I would be able to find out once and for all if the
Black Ship
had anchored – two of my goals in entering Redport. But when I turned to look in the other direction, I saw that the second of the towers was very near, which meant I was close to the other end of the Infinity of Dragonstraat. Perhaps if I went back along the spoke street towards the plain, I would find a lane leading directly to the tower and maybe there would be no soldierguards up this end; better still, maybe they had all decamped.

A door opened right beside me, and a woman stepped out, holding up a lantern. There was an anxious expression on her face, but seeing me, she froze. There was no time to conceal myself. I lifted my hands and offered them to her, cupped as if I was carrying something fragile. Her eyes dropped to them, her expression puzzled. This enabled me to step up and touch her.

Immediately and ruthlessly, I took control of her mind. Preventing her crying out or striking at me, I made her retreat into the dwelling and followed, closing the door behind us. I coerced her to return the lantern she was carrying to the hook on the wall, and then, at my behest, she led me along the passage and into a large kitchen. Swiftly I coerced her to regard me as a friend and to do nothing save what I asked her to do. It was an unsubtle but temporary measure I had resorted to often as Guildmistress of the Farseekers and it was just as well, for an older boy came running in from another door. He stopped dead when he saw the woman, an expression of mingled guilt and truculence on his dark, pugnacious little face. Then his eyes shifted to me and widened in astonishment. Aloud, I bade the woman introduce me to him and she did so.

When our hands met in the odd style I had discerned from the woman’s mind, I entered the boy’s mind and without compunction sent him to his bed with a strong coercive command to forget his mother’s visitor and to sleep as soon as his head touched the pillow. Then I sat and bade the woman bring me a mug of water. She obeyed and then sat while I drank. Setting down the mug, I laid a hand on her arm and entered her mind once more.

Riyad was her name and she was one of the great Gadfian underclass subservient to the Chafiri who were the elite of New Gadfia and also, now, of Redport. She thought of herself as a freewoman, though it was hard to conceive how she could think that, given she had been brought across the sea from Great Gadfia to Redport with a cargo of excess Gadfian daughters. I supposed I must have misunderstood her, reading this thought, but pressing deeper, I found that she and the women she had travelled with were all the third or fourth daughters of Gadfian families being sent as bondmates for Gadfian men in Redport who had been sent to the Red Land following a decision by the High Chafiri to transform occupied Redport into a proper settled colony. The men who had come out had wanted pureborn children, since the halfbreeds sired on slavewomen of other lands could not inherit. For true children, they needed Gadfian bondmates.

As always when I entered another mind, I discovered that information was not neatly organised or categorised. The incidental and the vital lay side by side, sometimes obscuring one another. I had to move through Riyad’s mind, following thought chains and exploring threads and odd niches. Rather than trying to build up a coherent picture of the Gadfians in Redport and of Riyad’s life in particular, both in her homeland and in the Red Land, I had to take what I could get and worry later about connecting it to other knowledge to formulate a picture of the settlement.

For instance, I wanted to know how the High Chafiri differed from the Chafiri and the Chafiri from the pureborn Gadfians, but when I found this idea, it was within a memory Riyad had of three High Chafiri daughters rumoured to have been aboard the same ship that had carried her and the other girls and women to Redport. Riyad had heard it as a rumour during the trip, though neither she nor any of the other daughters had seen these three women. It fascinated her to think that a High Chafiri woman could be sent to Redport by her father, even as Riyad had been sent, and she had built a whole story-fantasy for herself about what had happened to these women in Redport.

Her imagining was so detailed that for a while I became lost in the richness and poetry of it, but finally I gathered my wits and my will and pressed deeper under the imagining. Here I found the knowledge I had been seeking; only the offspring of a High Chafiri man and a High Chafiri woman were regarded as High Chafiri. Chafiri begot Chafiri in the same way, by blending two purebloods. Below came ordinary Gadfians like Riyad, born of pure Gadfian parents. Below these were halfbloods – those born of a Gadfian pureblood father and non-Gadfian mother. There were no children born of a relationship between a pureblood Gadfian woman and a non-Gadfian man, because Gadfians could not bond with non-Gadfians and Gadfian women of all classes could not have any relationship with a man save through bonding.

I gathered this from Riyad’s undermind, for her conscious mind was devoid of knowledge or curiosity, save that which concerned her own doings. She had no idea of what Redport had been before her people had invaded it or why it had been turned into a colony, nor where Great Gadfia was in relation to the Red Land. She only knew the distance between them was great because she had travelled it in a greatship, puking her heart out all the way.

It was little wonder she was so limited and ignorant, for it transpired that she had never been permitted outside her father’s compound in New Gadfia before he had informed her she was to be sent to Redport, where her husband awaited her. The walled dwellings, I realised, were called compounds and the only thing that had kept her sane during the journey to Redport was the notion that she would be mistress of a compound, not a thing that would have been possible, had she remained in New Gadfia. Somehow she and her bondmate had been bonded even though they had never met, and before her father had told her she was to be bonded. It had occurred by means of something or someone called an aproxim, and rather than saying bonded, Gadfians spoke of marrying and marriage. Husband was the word Riyad used to mean male bondmate, and I recognised it as a Beforetime word. She also called him
ban,
in her mind, which was not a name but a title in gadi approximating
master
. She thought of herself as a wife, another Beforetime word, but when her bondmate addressed her, he called her
sabra
, which seemed to be a respectful gadi term for a woman.

Riyad had no resentment about not being asked if she wanted to bond or to travel to Redport. Indeed she had been grateful, since in New Gadfia, daughters’ families were required to produce lavish and expensive gifts as a sort of payment for a husband, and many families, her own included, could not afford to secure bondmates for younger daughters. She had been the fourth daughter, and being sent away, she would escape the fate of many younger daughters who did not bond and came to serve as little more than drudges to their mother and father and later to a bonded sister’s family, for Gadfian women were unable to own anything save through their bondmates or children. Instead she had the chance of a life as mistress of a compound and mother to pureblood Gadfian children.

Riyad’s gratitude had been severely tested by the terrible, seemingly endless journey she had undertaken to reach Redport, but it was the life she had come to loathe that had truly broken her. She was bitterly, desperately unhappy, though she had not allowed this feeling to become conscious. She felt herself to be dutiful and obedient and content, as a good bondmate was supposed to be, but her unhappiness poisoned her every thought and deed.

Certainly she did not acknowledge how much she had hated her
ban
, since he had delivered her from the greatship, boasting of his importance and the sons he would give her, as he took her to her new home. She had never expected to love or even like her bondmate, but the modest compound of her dream had turned out to be a strange, dark, airless dwelling joined either side to the dwellings of other people, with no proper rooftop from which she could view the sea or the red desert while preserving proper modesty and seclusion. Only the poorest of the poor lived so close to other folk in New Gadfia. Even her parents had a small compound. Worst of all was the lack of a place where she could grow things and sit out in the sun and watch birds and one day dandle a baby on her lap, unseen by the world, as was proper. Her bondmate boasted endlessly of the lavish compound he would construct, but as a shipman, he slept aboard his vessel and she soon saw that he had no real interest in a home on land, nor in her save that she would beget sons for him. Riyad had come to understand that she would never have a proper compound, and would live in this dark, closed space forever like a trapped rat.

I probed a little deeper and was astonished to discover that all fresh food was grown in the domes and that whatever her bondmate had ordered was brought to her each day by the slaves he owned. Her tasks were to keep and clean the loathed house, prepare meals and have sons devoted to their father. The birthing of her son had given Riyad pain and had been endured in utter loneliness and terror, but then had followed years of great joy. For a time, tending the child had fulfilled Riyad, but the baby had grown into a wilful boy, elusive and dismissive of her in emulation of his father. Nor had she been able to conceive another child. This was not unusual, and in fact many women did not conceive at all, and could be set aside by their bondmates for this, after a period. But having borne a child, she was safe from that indignity, at least.

But she was bored and profoundly unhappy and she visited the bitterness she dared not acknowledge or show to her bondmate or son on the three hapless slaves who came each day to do her bidding. I saw with disgust the pettiness and cruelty of her dealings with the three women. To my horror, when she had heard them laugh once, she had felt they were laughing at her, and when her husband next visited, she had asked him to cut out their tongues, saying she feared they might cast dark spells over her. He had done so at once, as she had known he would, for like many Gadfian shipfolk, he believed in and feared the black arts.

I thought of Cinda and the other shadows from the Black City on Herder Isle, marred in the same terrible way, and wondered with a rush of despair how many women in Redport had suffered this fate. Could there be any connection between the thirty Herders who had been wrecked on Herder Isle and the Gadfians, that they should share such dreadful practices?

Riyad knew no one in whom she could confide or from whom she could seek comfort, for once brought to her husband’s house, she had remained within it, never communicating with the families either side of her for fear of attracting the attention of another man, which would result in her bondmate stoning her. I did not understand what it meant that a woman should be stoned, and pressed deeper, then wished I had not, for I saw a fleeting glimpse of a woman cringing against a wall as men threw stones at her as hard as they could.

I recoiled in horror from the bloody sight and it was some moments before I could bear to re-establish contact. I forced myself past the awful memory to find that stoning was a punishment specifically for women. Men were killed in equally horrible but different ways. The most horrifying thing was the pettiness of the misdeeds and crimes for which stoning was the punishment. But then it struck me with relief that perhaps these thoughts were not real. Riyad’s mind was full of superstitious beliefs and ignorant fantasies as well as beliefs and prejudices extrapolated wildly from something she had heard her
ban
or her son say.

What was clear was that women were constrained in Gadfian society, and this seemed to be a direct consequence of the fact that ranks in Gadfian society were maintained by bonding and pureblood births. This oppression of women also fitted with what I had been told by the Sadorians about how Gadfia had been in the Beforetime. Indeed it was because of the treatment of women that a great group of them had dared to escape, determined to leave race and land behind, eschewing their gods and practices and even their language in the hope of starting a new and more equal society. I wondered fleetingly what would have happened to those women, had not that escape coincided so fortuitously with the Great White, for surely Gadfian men would not have sat by and simply allowed women they thought of as their property to leave.

Riyad lived much in her imagination because she was so isolated, for as well as sleeping aboard his ship, her bondmate was often away voyaging across the sea delivering cargoes of ore and returning with grain and other goods. Her
ban
spoke of his trips to their son and she wheedled information from the boy by cooking him food he liked. She was so starved for conversation that she missed her ban’s boasting and demands when he was away, for then she had no one to speak to but her son and the three slavewomen she had rendered mute.

Most of her upper mind was filled with a great mass of domestic details, so I burrowed deeper, seeking that repository all minds had of information and matters that they had taken in but seemed not to need. As I had hoped, I discovered a rich store of disconnected fragments. There was much that Riyad might have used to remedy her ignorance and give her power over her life, even over her bondmate, had she any impulse towards deeper understanding of the world. But she had decided it was nothing to do with her. Fortunately I was free to rifle through this motley store of knowledge, and so I learned a good deal about New Gadfia as well as about Redport.

I learned that the building we were in was less poor than it seemed for it had a luxuriously appointed second level where her husband slept and ate and occasionally entertained when he came home. It would be interesting to observe one of these occasions from within the mind of Riyad’s
ban
, for he thought of the bronze-skinned Redlanders as dragonfolk, and often met with other Redland Gadfians, who believed as he did that all of the dragonfolk ought to be given to the white-faced lords for their slave army, and a new race of slaves bred from Gadfian halfbloods. Riyad had absorbed all this information, but her conscious mind simply concluded that the men met and drank and boasted of their sea journeys.