The Red Queen (92 page)

The others were agog, but I was only half listening now, thinking of the dream Dragon had spoken of, in which she had seen Ariel talking to the emissary. That meeting must have happened if his emperor had sent the emissary to grant the Gadfians a delay, but what of the promised weaponmachine? There seemed only one answer. Ariel knew I was drawing closer to Sentinel and he was not in Redport because he was there, wherever it was, waiting for me.

The thought chilled me to the bone.

I turned to Cora, asking, ‘Do you know of a Landman called Matthew? He has a scar on his face . . .’

She laughed. ‘All know of Mad Matthias because when he first came here he tried to rouse the dragonfolk against the slavemasters. Some of the Redland men beat him to within an inch of his life. Then they beat him again later for hatching a plan to steal a ship to go to fetch the Red Queen from the Land where he claimed she lay in an enchanted sleep.’

‘He lives yet?’ I asked, my heart pounding.

‘He does, scarred and limping and more devout than any Redlander about the coming of the Red Queen,’ Cora said. ‘But he did not come here on those ships you spoke of. He has been here since he was a lad.’

‘He has great courage but he was ignorant and arrogant and over-hasty in the beginning,’ Keely said softly, fiercely. ‘He has grown up and learned wisdom and patience.’

I stared at her. ‘You
know
him.’

She pressed her lips together. I could have coerced her, but instead, I said, ‘I knew him, too – in the Land, long ago when he was a boy. He was like a brother and I watched the slavers take him away without being able to help him. Will you tell me how to find him?’

Keely’s face had softened, but she asked, ‘To what end?’

I hesitated and saw that, though they were inclined to trust me, did trust me in Gretha’s case, I needed to give them something more concrete. I said, ‘I am looking for the man I love. He was aboard the ships from the Land. He knew Matthew – Matthias – and if he survived the journey, he would have sought him out. So would the others from the ships. The quickest way to find them is to find Ma . . . Matthias.’

‘You cannot escape Redport,’ Gretha warned. ‘There is no way to leave by sea, save on a slave vessel bound for the Spit or New Gadfia, or as part of a slave cargo being carried to some other land. And there is only barren desert that way.’ She waved her hand inland.

‘What is his name?’ Cora asked.

‘Rushton Seraphim,’ I said, and it gave me astonishing pain to say his name aloud. I felt such a mingling of longing and terror that I feared I would faint. Then Gretha suggested I eat, for I looked pale as a dish of goats’ milk. I looked into her face and understood that I had finally won their sympathy.

I had gobbled down several mouthfuls before the fiery spices in the food gripped my throat and my eyes began to water copiously. Gretha and Cora burst out laughing, and I realised they had been waiting for my reaction. I coughed and spluttered until Demet set a little dish of pale green creamy stuff beside me. I spooned some of it hastily into my burning mouth, eyes streaming, as Cora told me her own reaction to Redland food had been much the same to begin with. Gadfian food was even hotter.

‘You get used to the spices and the heat, and in the end you come to like it,’ she assured me.

Keely said she had tasted food in Slavetown so bland she had wondered that Landfolk did not die of boredom. That had set all of them to laughing and quarrelling lightly about food. I was largely silent, my own mind roiling as I tried to absorb all I had learned from them. I finished my bowl, using the flat bread and the creamy green stuff to mediate the heat of the spices. Even so, by the time I had finished, my nose was running and my tongue burning.

‘I do not wonder that a people who would eat such foods worship fire-breathing dragons,’ I rasped.

‘We do not worship them,’ Demet said, suddenly serious. ‘They are the emblem of the first Red Queen who raised the dragon in the Beforetime to protest the imprisonment of ship fish and greatfish by the govamen.’

‘The govamen imprisoned
fish
?’ I echoed doubtfully, thinking no one had ever suggested there had been a Red Queen in the Beforetime.

‘Greatfish and ship fish,’ Keely said eagerly. ‘They wanted to use them as weapons and spies.’

Gretha rolled her eyes and brought me a tiny orange fruit. ‘My son picked it from a bush that grows beyond the ruins,’ she said, peeling it deftly and offering it to me.

‘Those are the ruins of the place where the govamen held ship fish captive,’ Cora said.

Keely saw my bewilderment and explained that the ruins of the Beforetime place where fish had been imprisoned were north of the settlement in the area where goats were grazed, and where Gretha’s boy had found the fruit I was eating. There was another section of it at the base of the cliffs, she added, but whatever had connected the upper level to the sea level section had long since fallen to rubble.

I stared at her, the little fruit forgotten as it struck me the ruin might be connected to Sentinel. Yet what had ship fish to do with a computermachine, and how could
fish
be used as weapons? Perhaps the ruins were part of Eden, where beasts had been sent and kept in cryopods in the Beforetime. The thought that Eden might be so close made my heart race, for if so, there might be something there to help me locate Sentinel!

‘Tell me more about these ruins,’ I invited.

Cora shrugged dismissively. ‘There are only a few broken stones.’

‘It is said everything useful was taken by the Red Queen and her followers when they were stranded here after the Great White,’ Keely said eagerly. ‘They used it to begin transforming Redport into a proper settlement instead of a makeshift camp. The part that stands at the bottom of the cliffs is better preserved, despite the tides, but there is no way to get to it, save by sea, and no shipmaster with his wits about him would risk getting so close to shore in a ship boat, given the unruly currents.’

‘There is a high platform that the bottom section must once have extended to, which stands on great thick pillars of stone, but even if a ship boat would dare go close, there is no way to get up onto it,’ Demet said. ‘It is said the first Red Queen came to this land across the sea with her followers in response to the cries of sea beasts for help.’

‘She was supposed to have been a beastspeaker but I never heard there were Misfits in the Beforetime,’ Gretha said sceptically. She turned to me. ‘But you see why the Redlanders are the way they are about Misfits.’

I asked them bluntly about the static that was blocking my abilities so that I could only use them by touching the person I wanted to affect, but all four women looked at me blankly, even after I went to some trouble to describe it. I abandoned the subject and after they had inspected my clothes one last time, I coerced Nareem and sent him to his bed.

Gretha came with me to the door, and before I slipped away, she wished me luck. ‘I hope you find what you seek,’ she said.

I made my way north by the route to Slavetown suggested by the Landwomen, having decided that I would go from that side of the settlement because of the difficulties involved in leaving the settlement on its eastern side, as I had intended before encountering Nareem. I had asked casually about the mines, only to be told miners used the track between Redport and the domes constantly to push or pull wheeled vessels called hoppers used to transport ore from one mine or another. Though most of the mine traffic occurred in the mornings or late afternoons, there were lighter hoppers, which transported produce from the dome farms throughout the middle of the day. I had seen at once that I would be visible to them in daylight if I emerged anywhere along the eastern border of the settlement, save maybe in the south-east where the ground was rough and higher.

Of course, knowing of the movement of people between Redport and the domes would be useful to us. I could simply coerce a miner or one of the people fetching farm produce to let me join their crew, and thus pass unremarked across the open ground between the settlement and the domes. We could all enter Redport virtually unnoticed in that way, but more importantly, it would be a good route to bring Dragon in unseen, for we could conceal her in a food hopper and wheel her into the settlement.

The lines reached the edge of the settlement only a few streets from the gate to Slavetown, and if she could be got inside at the end of a day, just before the gate was closed, she would have all night to reveal herself to her people.

I had also learned that the metal rails upon which the hoppers ran did not pass through the streets as I had imagined, but entered a tunnel at the edge of the settlement, which sloped down and ran under the buildings and streets, eventually splitting into two lines. One led to a great subterranean food store, which could be reached by steps leading up to the Infinity of Plenty where there were storage sheds. The other line ran on to emerge near the beginning of the high stone cliffs that became the Talons, which clasped the bay. Cora had told me the rails ran from a small dome right along the Long Pier to its end where there was a mechanism that had been provided by the white-faced lords enabling a single slave to tip ore from the hopper directly into large tubes that snaked into the holds of greatships.

There were many piers striking out from the sandy shore, but it seemed the Long Pier was the only one that reached water deep enough to enable greatships to come alongside and directly take on cargo. All other coming and going between shore and greatship was conducted by ship boat.

I still regretted not being able to get down to the shore, but the sky was now a dark blue and lightening by the minute. I had little hope of getting out of the settlement by dawn, but at least I was now clad as a man and if I stayed away from the scythe streets and the infinities, as Gretha suggested, I was unlikely to encounter any Ekoni. Cora had also assured me that the curfew was less strict during the last watch, for the Ekoni were weary and ready for their beds, most of which were in long barracks in the southern part of the settlement, close to the cliffs. I would be very unlucky if I struck one of the zealots, she had added. Not liking the sound of a zealot, I moved carefully and quietly, listening hard and checking every turn before I entered a new street.

I was tired, of course, but elated and buoyed by having accomplished so much during my night in Redport. Of course, as always, many of the answers had given rise to new questions. One truly puzzling thing was how the Red Queen’s palace could have fallen into the ruin Gretha had described in little more than a decade. Certainly the Red Queen’s death could not have occurred more than a decade past, given Dragon’s age. The only answer seemed to be that it had been deliberately transformed into a ruin, though I could not imagine why the Gadfians would bother hammering broken stone walls to crumbling fragments, when they allowed friezes with images of the Red Queen to remain intact.

The fact that it
was
a ruin might serve me well, however it might distress Dragon, since it was unlikely there would be anyone guarding it. I could search the Palace Island for Luthen’s crypt, which I might have inquired about, I realised, by asking where the first Red Queen was buried.

I thought of Matthew and smiled to think that he had come to be called Mad Matthias. My smile faded somewhat at the thought of him scarred and limping, yet he had sometimes limped as a boy because of a mis-set bone, so maybe whatever fighting he had done here had exacerbated that old trouble. If only I could have gone immediately to Slavetown to seek him out, but Slavetown was inaccessible until dawn and I needed to let the others know that I was safe. Besides, it seemed that Matthew did not always sleep in Slavetown. Keely had told me he was often required to accompany his master, who was a master metalworker, to Quarry where he would help the man repair and replace the weapons used to train both the Ekoni and the would-be soldiers destined to serve in the army of the white-faced emperor.

I had learned about Slavetown. Keely had said there was no leadership, but later she had admitted there was a secret council. Unfortunately the names of the organisers had been unknown to her but she had said that Deenak would be able to direct me to Mad Matthias, and he would surely know.

Her reaction and Demet’s to my mention of the coming of the Red Queen had been reassuring. I had no doubt now that Dragon’s people awaited her eagerly and that they
would
rise when she made herself known to them. All the talk of dragons and sceptres and the news that the first Red Queen had ruled in the Beforetime was mysterious but essentially irrelevant.

I stopped abruptly, for looming up before me was the wall Cora had described enclosing Slavetown. I had meant to bypass Slavetown and reach the edge of the settlement more swiftly, but I had not come wide enough. I resisted a sudden impulse to follow the wall to the right and coerce my way past the two Ekoni guarding the gate to seek out Matthew, and made my way to the left. Following the wall would bring me to the edge of the settlement in any case, because Gretha had said Slavetown ran right along the edge of it.

I noticed that my mouth was still burning from the food I had eaten, and grinned at the memory of how greedily I had bitten into the food, mouth watering, for it had smelled delicious. The horrified look on my face must have been truly comical.

A light flickered to life in the window of a building on the other side of the narrow street. I turned into another street that followed the wall and heard a child’s muted wail, then, as the sky paled and brightened, I saw the red plain stretching away from the settlement.

I felt an immense wash of relief as I stepped from the path to the bare red earth, not only because I had managed to escape the settlement undiscovered, but because I felt the heavy weight of the block slide away.

I tried at once to reach the others, but to no avail. I ought to have been able to reach whoever was on watch atop the dome, unless it was Dragon keeping watch. I could not farseek her, after all. They might even have abandoned the post altogether, feeling it too exposed now that the sun was rising. Doubtless there were already miners making their way along the rails to the dome mines.

I glanced around and saw that the backs of buildings made another sort of wall all the way to the cliff wall, and wondered at a town that had not been walled, and yet maintained such a smooth perimeter that it might as well have been. Then I wondered which of the buildings housed the boy that Riyad’s son called his friend, because that had been close to the cliffs. This made me think of the goats the boys had herded together and of the tart little orange fruit Gretha’s son had picked in the Beforetime ruins where goats grazed. But the ground this side of Redport was broken and cracked and every depression was full of the powdery dust that had made our passage across the fallen plain so slow and dangerous. I regretted, now, that I had not asked the slavewomen about the surrounding plain, or the domes, but my mind had been on other matters.

Yet where
did
goats graze?

The ground I was on ran flat and broken in the direction of the sea but then sloped up quite steeply, and I thought, shifting my gaze to the top of it, of what Ana had said about a lip of high ground edging the stone cliffs, and then of Swallow, saying the escarpment we had climbed down ran around to the north then toward the cliffs. This lip might be the tail end of that high ground. The sky was reddening now, the sun moments from rising. There was now light enough for me to see that the slope was covered in a sparse scrubby grass. Not only that but there was a little horned animal grazing some way up it and I realised it was a tiny goat. I could see no human keeper, and given curfew had not yet ended, it seemed likely that it had escaped its enclosure.