The Red Queen (7 page)

‘This Naha . . .’ I began.

‘The Speci revere her still, though she is long dead, not only because she brought the Covenant and dwelt among them until her natural death, enriching them with her wisdom, but because she spoke with God,’ Ana said. ‘Anyone can speak
to
God, who hears all that is said in Habitat, but it is said that God
answered
Naha. Speci make pilgrimages to her grave marker when they want something very badly, because it is believed that her spirit might intercede with God on their behalf.’

I thought it highly likely that Naha had been one of the Tumen, though I could not imagine why she would enter voluntarily into the benevolent captivity that was Habitat.

Tell me more,’ I croaked.

‘Naha established the first Committee,’ Swallow said. ‘She chose the eleven eldest Speci to serve on it with her, and since then older Speci have always made up the Committee and served on it until they die, or grow incapable for one reason or another.’

‘Some of the Speci believe that we were resurrected so close together because births in Habitat have dropped,’ Dameon offered mildly. ‘Resurrectees have proven rather more fertile than those born in Habitat, and adults can bear children sooner.’

‘How many . . . Speci are there?’ I rasped.

‘At present three hundred and seven, counting us,’ Swallow said. ‘In the beginning there were five hundred, comfortably accommodated.’

‘We ought to let Elspeth rest,’ Ana said, a warning note in her voice.

‘Yes,’ Dameon said. ‘Elspeth, we can talk more when you are stronger. For now, simply rest and recover.’

I said nothing, realising that I was as exhausted as if I had ridden for a day, yet I had only been awake a short while and had done little more than listen. I was weary enough that I decided to sleep on what I had learned instead of gnawing on it, as was my wont. This thought reminded me of seeing Maruman prowling through the ruins of a Beforetime city, and I wondered if Gahltha and the other beasts had found him, and Ahmedri and Gavyn. A normal person would give up on us after waiting months, but Gavyn, whose spirit was merged with Rasial’s, was far from normal, and Ahmedri was an abnormally stubborn man. Commanded by the overguardian of the Earthtemple to remain with me until I located Miryum, I had no doubt he would do just that.

‘Sleep,’ Dameon murmured, and he began empathising serenity so forcefully that it was easy to see the Talent shared the same root ability as coercion. Unable to muster the will to resist, I wondered drowsily at what point empathy actually
became
coercion.

‘We will move you to the hut,’ Swallow told me. ‘The bed there is far more comfortable than this altar.’

Altar?
I wondered, but had not the strength to say the word aloud.

‘Let’s keep her here until the sun moves off her,’ Analivia said, sounding far away. ‘Sikoka told me all those resurrected are sun-starved. I am sure that is the reason for the opening in the Hub roof right over the altar.’

Sun? Opening?
I thought muzzily.

‘Sleep,’ Dameon commanded and my mind floated away into unconsciousness like an untethered boat carried from the shore.

Each waking restored more of my memories, but this time I woke in a deep darkness that felt like night, still unable to move a muscle, with three clear convictions.

The first was that Miryum had been taken captive by the Tumen, and even now lay sleeping in a cryopod in the Galon Institute in Pellmar Quadrants.

Even before leaving Obernewtyn, I had been struck by the similarity between the description of a sleeping Miryum in dreams set down in the Coercer guild’s dream-book and my own past-dream of Cassy, waking from sleep inside some sort of transparent container. I had dismissed the similarity at the time, for the idea of there being any connection between two women separated so widely in time had seemed absurd. Now it was utterly clear to me that both women had been enclosed in cryopods at some point. All I had learned of Miryum during my strange encounter with Straaka’s spirit fitted. He had said Miryum left the mountains seeking a city she had dreamed of, where she had imagined she would find Beforetimers with the power to resurrect him from the dead. His only access to the world of matter had been through the coercer’s senses, and as she had become ill and then fevered, her perceptions had grown confused and distorted. Straaka had said nothing of the Tumen because he would not have seen them if Miryum had fallen unconscious and had been brought to Pellmar Quadrants and sealed into a cryopod without ever waking. Straaka had spoken of a period in which she had been unreachable, then she had communicated with him in spirit-form, first begging him to help her because she could not wake, and then later, asking him to help her die. That she had not been resurrected in Habitat probably meant she had taint sickness. The story Swallow had told of the twin Speci sisters made it clear that a sick person would not be resurrected in Habitat until they were well, and according to Pavo, even the Beforetimers had been unable to cure taint sickness. Perhaps a person who could not be made well would never be wakened . . .

I shivered and tried again, uselessly, to move, before retreating again into my thoughts.

Despite everything it was still difficult to accept that the coercer had managed to bind the tribesman’s spirit to hers, thereby preventing it being drawn into the mindstream when his body died. But given what had happened with the spirits of Miky and Angina, not to mention the story Rasial had told of the merging of his spirit with Gavyn’s, I could hardly doubt it. Besides, it was Straaka’s striving to free Miryum that had enabled him to reach me in my dreams, even as the overguardian of the Earthtemple had foreseen.

Originally I had assumed the overguardian’s prediction meant Miryum had been taken captive by someone in the Land, but if I was right and the coercer had been taken by the Tumen and put into a cryopod, she was no less a prisoner than if she had been locked in a cell. Even aside from Straaka’s insistence that she had some part to play in my quest, I could not leave her in the Galon Institute trapped in undying, unageing sleep. I felt a visceral horror at the thought of such a fate, not to mention the knowledge that Straaka’s spirit would share it.

My second realisation, though less immediately important, was that Hannah had been
with
Cassy at Inva when the Great White ended the Beforetime.

I ought to have guessed it at once when Analivia described her Beforetime dream of two women who could only be Hannah and Cassy, gazing at images of devastation on the vision screen of a computermachine. How else should they have been looking at images of destruction wrought by the Great White if they had not survived it? And how could they be together if they had not been together when it happened?

If I had needed proof, Jacob’s journal offered it. He had scribed that Hannah was far from the Land when the Great White occurred. My most recent Beforetime vision offered even more compelling proof, for the man Ishmael had spoken to Cassy of Hannah being at the Inva complex where the Beforetime Misfits had been held at the very moment when the Great White had begun. He had said that she must have foreseen what was about to happen, which suggested she had not foreseen it before, or at least not exactly when it would occur. According to the teknoguilders, Beforetime people had occasionally experienced visions of the future, but for the most part they dismissed or ignored them. Hannah had been an exception, seeing both forward and backward in time, like futuretellers.

As to how she and the others could have survived the Great White, that was my third realisation. They had taken refuge in the human-sized cryosleep pods Doktaruth had mentioned being installed at the Inva complex. Ishmael had told Cassy that Hannah dreamed of a way they could survive and I knew from other past-dreams that animals inside cryosleep pods had no need of food or air or water beyond what the cryopod could supply. I was sure I had dreamed of her waking in what I now understood to be a cryopod and it was all too easy to imagine Cassy releasing the flame bird then racing back to Hannah who would propose they close themselves into cryosleep pods in Doktaruth’s chambers. Had all of the Beforetime Misfits done as Hannah suggested? It was hard to imagine the tough, hard-eyed Violet submitting herself to an endless sleep, moreover a sleep at what had been the very centre of destruction, if I was right about the original experimental Sentinel being the cause of the Great White. Of course I had no idea how Hannah would have managed to operate the cryopod mechanisms. The obvious answer seemed to be that she had left it in the hands of a machine. Certainly I could imagine Ines calmly and efficiently obeying the order to close Hannah and Cassy and the Beforetime Misfits into cryopods and to wake them when the earth and air were clean again, yet how terrifying to give control of your life to a machine.

But had not the people of the Beforetime done exactly this when they developed Sentinel?

The only reassuring thing in all of this was that, following a long period in a cryopod, Cassy and Hannah had presumably recovered, even as Ana and the others assured me I would recover.

Abandoning yet another fruitless attempt to move, I tried to picture those final hours of the Beforetime, Hannah meeting the Misfits for the first time since they had been taken from the original Reichler Clinic. Ironic to think their kidnapping and imprisonment by govamen had probably saved them, for otherwise they would surely have perished with the millions said to have died during the Great White or in its dreadful aftermath. But what had Ishmael meant by saying to Cassy that Hannah had got something wrong? Presumably it was something important – maybe that the end was nigh and that she was not at Obernewtyn. There must have been some time, though, for Hannah had contacted Jacob and they had spoken long enough to spare him the terrible fate of their friends, leaving him to live out his life alone at Obernewtyn, until one day he decided to leave.

To come here, I thought, where I had come countless years later . . .

But where did Analivia’s vision of Cassy and Hannah looking at scenes of destruction on a computermachine screen fit in? The words the women had spoken and the fact that both women had long hair – though it had been short in my recent vision – suggested that their conversation had taken place after they were free of the cryopods. But would hair grow during cryosleep if a person did not age? Unless they had been free of them for some time before leaving the complex, the visions might after all be long past events captured by machines.

If I was right, it explained much that had been incomprehensible to me before: how Cassy and the Beforetime Misfits had survived after the Great White; how so much time could have passed between the Great White and their arrival in the Land at the end of the Age of Chaos.

I wondered with a stab of pity if Hannah had known when she entered the cryopod that Jacob would be dead before she emerged. If so, she had not told him, for he had never spoken of it in his journal.

After they had been awakened, Hannah had almost certainly travelled with Cassy and the other Beforetime Misfits to the Red Land. Oddly, I had only recently speculated that both women might eventually have made their way to the Land, and had wondered if they had ever met again. It had never occurred to me that they might have travelled to the Land together and yet it now seemed obvious that Cassy and the others had been guided first to the Red Land and later to the Land by Hannah’s visions.

Swallow had never spoken of Hannah making the journey with the D’rekta and his Twentyfamilies ancestors to the Land, but perhaps the gypsies had some other name for her. Swallow had once told me that pureblood Twentyfamilies went by a use name, keeping their true name for those of their blood and as a gift to be given in profound love. He had told me that his father and mother had never exchanged truenames, but that his father had given his name to Iriny’s mother. It might also be that Hannah’s name had been forgotten because she and Cassy had parted company immediately upon reaching the Land. I knew that Cassy had settled at Stonehill for a decade or so with the Beforetime Misfits, raising her son and building her sculpture school, creating messages and instructions for me that would survive the passage of time between her death and my birth, but Hannah might have set off at once for the highlands, drawn by the memory of Obernewtyn. Though she must have known by then that Jacob was lost to her forever. Perhaps she had dreamed of the journal he had scribed as he prepared to leave Obernewtyn, and had hoped to find it. But she had never done so, else the journal would not have been in the crypt for the teknoguilders to discover.

After finding she could not get to Obernewtyn, she might have settled in the highlands, as I had surmised, eventually bonding with a highlander and giving birth to a child from whom Rushton was descended. She would have been old to give birth, but women in the Beforetime had apparently been far more fertile than those of us who lived in the aftermath of the Great White. And Rushton had told me of an ancestor of his mother’s who had been visited from time to time by Twentyfamilies gypsies. That would fit if the woman had been Hannah, for she would surely have stayed in contact with Cassy. According to Rushton, the old ancestor had eventually vanished, rumoured to have wandered up into the deadly high mountains. That, too, would fit with her being Hannah.

I shook my head, imagining Rushton’s impatience at my considering such questions at such a time, but what else could I do but think when I could not move a muscle? Belatedly it struck me with mingled shock and elation that I
had
moved. I had shaken my head without the least bit of effort! As I lay there, trying to muster the courage to try again, I heard someone moving about nearby.

‘Elspeth,’ Dameon said.

I turned my eyes towards his voice and realised I could see him, a dark man-shape against what looked to be a window fitted with narrow horizontal slats set close one above the other, save for two that hung slightly crooked, letting in thin wide shafts of bluish light. Moonlight, I guessed.

Dameon came closer and I heard the sound of something creak as he sat down.

‘Where . . . am I?’ I croaked. My mouth was very dry.

‘You are in bed in the hut assigned you, in Habitat,’ the empath answered. He leaned forward, lifted my head and gently pushed some pillows in behind it. I heard the sound of water being poured and wondered uneasily how long I had slept this time. I drank thirstily when he brought a mug to my lips.

‘Sip,’ he cautioned, reminding me again of my solicitous Tumen attendant. Then he took my hand up and pressed it to the mug, wrapping my fingers around it. ‘Hold it,’ he urged. ‘It is not that your muscles are too weak to hold the mug, but that your will does not understand you are capable of it. Here is Tasha, who will help your body to remember itself.’

I saw a slight figure behind Dameon and realised this must be one of the Speci.

‘I am Tasha,’ said a soft, diffident voice. It was the voice of a child and yet it seemed too possessed not to belong to an adult.

‘I feel . . . terribly weak,’ I croaked.

‘It is an illusion,’ Dameon said firmly. ‘I know it feels real because I felt it too. But your body is perfectly able to do anything you would ask of it.’

‘How long . . . have I slept?’ I asked. ‘Feel so tired . . .’

‘Only three days,’ he said reassuringly. ‘You will sleep a good deal to begin with. It is paradoxical to be tired after being asleep for so long, but you will need plenty of normal sleep to recover.’

‘Do not be afraid,’ said Tasha, drawing off the covers that had been laid over me. Then to my astonishment, she spilled cold liquid onto my bare belly, making me aware that I was near enough to naked. Tasha, no more than a shadowy form still, took no notice of my gasp and began to rub the liquid into my skin with strong, pressing circular movements, and suddenly I remembered Kella’s description of the healing touch of the strange gold-skinned Okan. Surely Tasha was using the same healing process, for the liquid she had poured onto me was not water but some sort of oil, which she gradually worked over my chest and shoulders and along my arms, kneading me somewhat as if I were a slab of pastry. Kella had told me that Okan used oil, too.