The Red Queen (75 page)

I woke with a start to find myself lying in pitch darkness. For one strange moment, I thought I was back in Midland in the Galon Institute, but as soon as I moved, a thin line of light showed above my head, and I realised that I was lying in one of the strange sleeping shelves aboard the glide. I had no idea how long I had slept but I was sure my dream of Gilaine had been a true dream. Nor could it be coincidence that I dreamed of her so soon after Dragon had dreamed of her. Maryon would say that her recurrence in our dreams indicated that some sort of encounter with her lay in our future. Of course it might only be that we had dreamed of her and her companions because we were getting nearer the Red Land, whether or not we stopped there.

Wondering if we were still moving north, I got out of the sleep shelf and made my way along the short passage to the privy and was pleased when I tried the lever above the little basin attached to the wall and water came gushing from it. I had been afraid we might have run out. I washed my face and rinsed my mouth quickly. Ana had told us somewhat apologetically that the glide had water and the means of making more, but that it had been unable to do so since we had begun to overfly the Blacklands, so we must henceforth be careful, for we needed it more for drinking than cleansing ourselves. No doubt she felt guilty that we had bathed.

Coming out into the main chamber, a glance at the screen told me it was dark outside, but there was nothing to say whether it was the middle of the night or approaching dawn since there was no moon visible and only a scatter of stars. Dameon lay stretched out on a chair bed under a blanket. There was no sign of Ana or Swallow or indeed of Dragon.

I went to the control bench where Hendon sat, and asked if we were going north still.

‘Yes User Seeker,’ Hendon said, his bland voice pitched low.

My stomach growled and I was about to go looking for food when I noticed with a little shock that the whole wolf pack was gathered at the front of the glide about Gavyn, who squatted facing Gobor. The little owl was fastened to the back of the nearest seat, and Rasial lay under it, seemingly asleep. Gavyn’s entire attention was on the grizzled pack leader. They were not beastspeaking else I would have heard it, but I was vividly reminded of seeing Gavyn on the farms at Obernewtyn, communing in some mysterious way with Rasial.

‘Not all that is exchanged/said is in talk,’ Darga sent to me, and I turned to see the big dog lying by the wall, watching me sombrely. It was the first time I could remember him speaking to me since we had been taken captive by the andrones, and his tone seemed less remote. I wondered if, having chosen to have his love of Jik erased from his mind by the Agyllians to free him of the torment of his despair after the boy was killed, he had expunged me from his mind as well. Yet maybe it was more that I was a reminder of what he had thrown away. It was not that he had forgotten Jik, after all, only his love for the boy, and the memories that held that love. It struck me as an irony that it might be his inability to remember how he had felt after Jik’s loss that had allowed him to form an attachment to Ana.

I looked back at the wolves only to see several of them glance at me, as if feeling my gaze. Then Gobor turned to give me a long look. The dim light falling from the panels and buttons on the control bench played a pattern of light and colour over the wolf’s grizzled face, but there was no warmth in his eyes, nor any welcome. That cold gaze told me that Gobor had allied himself to me but had no love for me.

I turned to make my way to the side window at the rear of the vessel, which must be facing east if we were going north, and saw a faint brightening along the horizon. I sat down to watch the day come, thinking again of my dream of Gilaine and what it might mean for her and for Daffyd, if she truly had been taken to another land.

I sensed someone looming over me and turned to see Dameon standing and stretching. ‘I am sorry if I disturbed you,’ I whispered.

‘I was not sleeping,’ he said in his low voice. ‘What do you see?’

‘Day on the verge of breaking; there is no moon so I cannot see what is under us now.’

‘Blacklands,’ the empath said with certainty. ‘I feel a great cold void below us, save for occasional flashes of life – small ferocious mindless life and large hungry life, but no intelligence.’ There was a strangeness in his voice and on impulse I reached out to take his hand. He allowed me to draw him down next to me, though as usual his emotional shield strengthened. I tried to firm my own ever-inadequate emotional shield to prevent myself inflicting my every emotion on him, for he looked pale and strained. I felt a stab of consternation to see that there were dark shadows under his eyes and I asked gently, ‘Dameon, are you well?’

He hesitated and then seemed to make up his mind to speak. He said with a sigh, ‘I have been thinking about the nature of love.’

My heart sank but I pressed my head to his shoulder. ‘You are my dearest friend, Dameon. I cannot tell you how sorry I am that we had to leave Balboa in Habitat. I know you are suffering because of it.’

The empath moved away from me gently but decisively and said almost sharply, ‘You are mistaken in thinking I regret leaving Balboa, Elspeth. It saddens me that we left the Speci in captive ignorance, but God will care for them as her program commands and there is hope of release for them.’

There was no lie in his tone, but there was something that perhaps only someone who loved him could have perceived. ‘You think I ought to have tried harder to convince the computer to let them go?’

He shook his head and said flatly, ‘I do not blame you for anything you have done.’

‘Yet you blame me for something, I think.’

I stopped abruptly, experiencing a sudden powerful reluctance to go on and realised with shock that the empath had evoked his considerable Talent to silence me. It would have accorded with my own nature to bend to his will, but my guilt at seeing his pain forced me to speak. ‘Dearest Dameon, I know you so very well that I think I know all there is to know about you. But no person can ever truly know another. I remember back in Saithwold how shocked I was when you seemed so angry at me . . .’

‘I
was
angry at you,’ Dameon said, and there was anger in his voice now. Suddenly all the stiffness and control in him dissolved and I felt a sort of heat rush away from him as he said, ‘I was angry because you loved Rushton and he loved you and . . .’

‘I know,’ I said hastily, amazed to have roused to anger a man I had almost never seen angry. ‘We could not seem to break through to one another.’

‘No,’ Dameon said harshly. ‘I was exasperated that you could not seem to say to him what he needed to hear, and that he could not let you speak. But I was
angry
because what you offered and he could not accept was what I most desired.’

‘You
do
love someone!’ I cried. ‘Not Balboa but someone else back at Obernewtyn! And you had to leave them to come with me. Oh Dameon . . .’

I floundered into silence seeing the look of furious exasperation in his expression. ‘Elspeth, you are more Talented than anyone I have even known, but oh my dearest one, you are such a fool when it comes to emotions!’ he said, half laughing and half snarling, and to my utter amazement he reached out to grasp my shoulders, jerked me close and kissed me unerringly full upon the mouth.

It was not the kiss of a friend but of a lover, and as empathised passion flooded my senses, I kissed him back in a shattering echo of his passion. The embrace lasted for a long dizzying moment, and then Dameon pulled away from me. He had to hold me up; so intoxicating was the potency of his desire breaking upon my mind in great hungry waves that I tried to kiss him again.

‘Enough,’ he said huskily, shaking me then releasing me with a little push. ‘I should not have done that, but how can you not have known what even Rushton knew? What half of Obernewtyn guessed? I did not leave behind someone I loved, Elspeth. I came with her.’

I gaped at him, my blood ringing with his longing. ‘I . . . you . . .’ I stopped as a multitude of small memories and fragments of conversation fluttered through my mind. The strange understanding Rushton had always seemed to have with Dameon; his sorrowful manner as he bade me let Dameon go to Sador for a year after we had declared our love, saying the empath needed time; the way he had pushed Dameon and me together when he was trying to drive me away from him; and the way Dameon had reacted when Balboa had cried out that I did not love him and never would.

‘You love me,’ I whispered.

‘Profoundly,’ Dameon said flatly. Then he heaved a great sigh and his shoulders slumped as if some enormous tension had been released.

I shivered and put my arms around myself. ‘Why did you push me so hard to reach out to Rushton when he rejected me in Saithwold?’

‘Should I have left my friend to despair and madness in order to claim what did not belong to me? I did what I could to bring you together, but none of it stopped me loving you. Wanting you.’

His words took my breath away, not just their meaning but the direct and explicit passion of them. I had never seen Dameon look so alive. He seemed a stranger to me, handsome, full of desire and grief.

He went on resolutely, growing calmer as he spoke. ‘The simple truth is that I have loved you since Ariel lined us up outside the maze at Obernewtyn to march us to the farms that very first time. To Rushton, though I did not know it then. Before we even spoke, I felt all the brightness of you; your fierce independence and your courage and sorrow . . . how should I not love such a vivid spirit?’ He passed a hand over his eyes and laughed a little wildly, saying almost to himself, ‘It is strange but I never guessed it would be a relief to speak the words that I have held back for so very long.’

‘Dameon, I . . .’

The empath interrupted gently but firmly. ‘You love Rushton. I know it better than anyone can because I feel it. I always felt that you could not love me because of Rushton’s presence, because even when you feared him, you were drawn to him. I was like the moon when the sun shines in the sky at the same time, its light all but extinguished. When I understood that
I
had been chosen to come with you on this quest from which you would not return, and that Rushton was forbidden to go, it shames me to tell you that I exulted. I had done nothing to interfere with what lay between you, but if you must leave him, and he could not follow, perhaps at last you would turn to me and see me not only as a friend but as a man.’ He laughed with genuine if despairing humour. ‘Spoken aloud all of this sounds the maudlin ponderings of a fool. I
was
a fool to think you would cease to love Rushton just because you were severed from one another. Had you not loved him as passionately as he loved you, despite all of the obstacles and hurdles that had come between you? If love could survive all of that, how should mere separation shatter it? Even though you were going away from him and thought never to see him again, I could feel that love you bore him burning bright and steady. Balboa cut me to the quick because she spoke the truth. She made me see that even when the sun was quenched, you carried a vision of it in your heart. Poor unhappy Balboa made me see that you would never love me, though it did not make me love her.’ He drew a long breath, straightened his shoulders and smiled. ‘It shocks me to discover that I am glad I have said the words at last.’

I opened my mouth then closed it, utterly dumbfounded.

He sighed. ‘I did not mean to tell you how I felt, nor ever to speak of it, and truly I should not have kissed you, nor empathised my feelings to make you respond to me. It was emotional coercion and yet I cannot regret the sweetness of holding you in my arms and feeling you respond wholly to me just this once, my dearest Elspeth.’

‘Dameon,’ I whispered, moved and shaken to the core.

Soft sunlight touched his face and it was weary and yet peaceful as if all the anguish and tension I had seen since leaving Habitat had suddenly drained away. He was beautiful and I could not look at him. I turned to the window, seeing the sun had risen, and looked for the dark and ruined earth, the punishing ugliness of it. But there was no darkness. Ahead lay a great undulant body of shining golden silk that ran away and away to the horizon. I looked down to catch a glimpse of the black, barren shoreline rimmed in dead white and the bleached bones of some vast beast, then it was behind us, receding.

‘What is it?’ Dameon asked, a little hoarsely.

I turned and stared into his dear face. ‘Oh Dameon, it is over. We have reached the end of the Desolation. We are flying over the sea.’

Later in the morning I sat at the front of the glide, Maruman asleep on my lap. I had been looking out for an hour, half-mesmerised by the milky sea we were flying over. All the world shone, pale and nacreous and indistinct, for the sun was cast over by a thin veil of cloud. We were flying much more slowly now than when we had been over land, and low enough for me to see that the gusty wind that had just begun to buffet the glide was sending the water into sharp little peaks. Veils of sea spray were streaming away from the tips of each one. It was beautiful and utterly strange to look down on the pale sea while flying over it like a bird, but sometimes my heart would suddenly heave up into my mouth in terror at the thought that we had passed out of sight of all land and that there was nothing to land on, nothing to swim
to
, if the glide should fall.

The fact that it was flying much lower than it had, and slowly, made me afraid it might be running out of whatever powered it. But hearing me say as much, Ana insisted it was only because it did not have to fly as high or fast, because the sea was not tainted. Besides which, Hendon had told her it was designed only to fly a little above the ground and quite slowly under ordinary circumstances.

I was glad I had not known that before. It was absurd, but the fact remained that flying over water rather than land had brought back all the terror I had felt when the glide had first flown, and this bout of fear was proving no less difficult to overcome. The only real distraction was my memory of the events of the early morning, and I had no wish to dwell on what had happened. Thinking of Dameon made me want to look at him, and I had to restrain myself, for though he could not see the direction of my gaze, he would feel it.

I did love the empath. In some ways I loved him more wholly than I loved Rushton, for was he not gentler and kinder and more purely good than anyone I had ever met? I had always set him upon a pedestal and measured all others against him. But I now knew it was not a pedestal the empath wanted, and that which he desired above all things, I could not give. What a cruel irony that he should choose me to love, of all the women in the world! And yet perhaps he had no more chosen me than I had chosen Rushton.

Strangely, though I was quite devastated by his declaration of love, Dameon did not appear downcast in the wake of it. He had been talking with Dragon when I came up from checking on the horses soon after sunrise, and hearing his laugh ring out, utterly unforced, it occurred to me that speaking of his love might have freed him from it. Or maybe it was merely that he had been released from an endless caution. Either way,
I
was far more troubled by what had happened than he. Indeed, I had been trying hard not to seem to avoid the empath while avoiding him. I did not know how to think of him or of his kiss, which had stirred me more deeply than I could put down to his empathy alone. I could not see Dameon as I had before, and yet I did not know how to see him now.

But it was not only concern for Dameon’s heart that troubled me. I felt my own failure to have noticed his feelings very keenly. There had been so many clues! His continual and perfect awareness of my physical whereabouts despite his blindness; the way he had always thrown up or strengthened his emotional shields around me. Of course I had merely supposed he guarded himself because of my inability to properly shield my emotions, while all the while poor Dameon had been trying to block his sensitivity to me.

But it was not only with the empath that I lacked emotional sensitivity. It had been the same with Rushton. Not long before he had spoken of love in Sador, I had been convinced he had fallen in love with Freya, who had been trying to help him access his power. And I had been singularly slow to realise that Kella had fallen in love with the gypsy beasthealer, Darius. And what of Dragon’s greenstick love for Matthew? Again and again I had failed to see what was before my eyes. Even back at Kinraide orphan home, I had not been aware that my own brother had come to love Rosamund. Of course, emotions had always discomforted me – my own as well as others’. I had put this down to my lack of empathy, but many Misfits lacked that Talent and were still sensitive to emotions. Even entirely unTalented people like Katlyn showed great sympathy for others. And it was not as if I lacked the ability to feel. I felt pity and anger and love, too. So how was it that I had such difficulty in seeing it outside of my own feelings? It was as if that one perception had been blunted.

Tangled in my own reflections, I was glad to see Ana and Swallow approach. The gypsy’s eyes narrowed and I guessed he was seeing in my aura some of the turmoil I was feeling, but Ana only asked if I did not think Swallow might be right about the glide being bound for the Red Land.

‘We are still heading north and now there is nothing to stop us going west,’ she said. ‘And this strait we are passing over might easily be the Andol Sea that Kelver Rhonin mentioned.’

‘What I have been wondering is what will happen if the glide does not come to land,’ Swallow said.

‘If that is so, we had better hope this glide floats,’ I snapped, wishing he would keep this sort of speculation to himself, given there was nothing we could do if he was right.

Ana said decisively that we would reach land. ‘Hannah would never have let Elspeth take a glide if she was not to come to the end of the journey safely,’ she insisted.

I thought that Hannah might only have seen the safe beginning of a journey, and not its end, and the look Swallow gave me told me he too had doubts, but neither of us said a word.

Afternoon came and wore on and there was still no sign of land ahead. The trouble was that, for all its neatness, some of the map was not to scale and other sections of it were based upon Beforetime maps. What if this was the Andol Sea but the strait had widened since then, or if the immense northern landmass shown had sunk into the sea? The one good thing was that somewhere north lay the Red Land. But whatever lay ahead, we would see it long before we reached it, for the wind had cleared the veil of cloud from the face of the sun before dropping away completely so that the water beneath us now lay utterly becalmed, seemingly to the horizon.

Night came and it was still calm, as if we glided over a mirror in which stars glimmered and drifted. No one slept.

Dragon moved to the front of the glide, and sat cross-legged on the floor with Gavyn. He and Rasial had gone to their chamber with the wolves before dawn, returning with them after the sun had set. Whatever reservations the Brildane had once had about the spirit-merged pair, they seemed to have shed them. Rasial now lay with her head on Gavyn’s knee, in the midst of the wolves, and the one-eyed pup was asleep on the pale soft brush of her tail. Ana had told me she tried to give the boy some new clothes but he had left them lying on the floor, yet he had let her show him the privy and had used it.

‘I think he is the most mysterious creature I have ever known,’ she had added, and watching him, I felt he was the least human-like human I had ever met.

Suddenly, Gavyn turned to look at Dragon who had another of the cubs on her lap and was brushing its coat. Unseen by her, the boy reached out to her hair. At first I thought he wanted to pet it as if it were some furry little animal, but his hand did not actually touch it.

‘
Adantar
likes the fire of mornirdragon. His spirit is drawn to her brightness/radiance,’ Maruman sent, from my lap.

A wind sprang up and before long a ragged flock of black clouds converged to blot out both moon and stars. Rain began to fall suddenly, very hard and heavily, lashing against the hull of the glide and running like great tears down the windows. It was the first rain I had seen in a very long time and I stared out at it tearing down the outside of the window beside me in fascination, dimly aware the others were doing the same. But then jagged spears of lightning began to fly about us, illuminating the purple undersides of the clouds, and thunder began to rumble and crack, driving us all away from the windows. Eventually lightning struck the glide and there was a violent flash of radiance that sent the wolves fleeing to their chamber. Ana hurried to the front of the glide to ask the androne if the vessel had been harmed and came back looking white about the lips.

‘Hendon said the storm will not kill us so long as the glide is in the air.’

‘Does he say how long it will be before the glide is
not
in the air?’ Swallow asked, getting to his feet.

‘I didn’t ask,’ she admitted, glancing at him. Her apprehension faded as their eyes locked and they drifted away.

I envied them the distraction of their love, envied, too, what they felt, for seeing how they were with one another reminded me vividly of my first days in Sador with Rushton, how our bodies had seemed always to incline to one another, as if of their own will. Suddenly I felt very tired and I welcomed the fatigue, for it shaved off the sharp edges of my anxiety. Though the storm was still battering the glide and there was no sign of land, I lay down along the bench, shifting Maruman against my belly, and slept.

‘Elspeth?’

I looked up to see Dragon gazing anxiously down into my face. Hers was white, her eyes huge. ‘Did I cry out?’ I mumbled. The dream I had been having dissolved even as I tried to put it into words, leaving only an echo of grief and loss and the image of an endless black sea. ‘I dreamed there was no land . . .’ I mumbled.

‘Land is there,’ Dragon said, pointing to the front of the glide.

Her words galvanised me and I sat up so fast I pushed Maruman to the ground. He hissed at me, but I ignored him, for ahead of the glide I could see a long high coastline of dark cliffs rising precipitously up from the moonlit sea ahead of the glide, like a great forbidding black wall. The shoreline stretched out of sight in either direction with no sign of any break or beach that would allow a ship to land. I was reminded both of Norseland and of the walled black city on Herder Isle. Dragon wondered aloud if it was Blacklands, but by the time we had moved to the front of the glide, we could see a fringe of growth all along the cliffs, which meant it was not Blacklands, though it might well be darklands.

As the glide drew nearer the land, my heart climbed into my dry mouth, for although it was gaining height, it was doing so painfully slowly. Despite Ana’s avowal that Hendon knew what he was doing, we barely cleared the broken edge of the cliff, and I wondered again if the source of power for the vessel was beginning to run low. Certainly there had been no way to predict the number of diversions we would have to make, and maybe God had miscalculated.

The glide did not rise high as it had done over the last landmass, and I took this as a sign that the land we had reached was not tainted. Soon we passed over a slightly hilly terrain that reminded me of the Brown Haw Rises in the Land and I saw that it wore a patchy stubble of grasses with an occasional clump of battered-looking shrubs, but no trees. That there was nothing outsized argued against it being darklands, though the shrubs might well be some small plant grown large. It was very dry land, however, for our passing lifted great sheets of dust in our wake. It appeared to be uninhabited by humans, for we saw neither settlements nor roads. But it was not lifeless. Soon after the moon set, a herd of very small deer-like creatures bounded in a wave through the bright wedge of light cast by the glide before plunging again into darkness. I felt a surge of joy to see them flowing through the light, after the endless deadness of the Desolation.

The land grew gradually flatter and more barren, broken here and there by deep narrow crevasses and cracks. Then the glide turned sharply and decisively to the west.

‘Why did we turn?’ I asked Hendon. ‘Is it more taint . . . contamination?’

‘The hull instrumentation indicates the terrain we are passing over is untainted, User Seeker,’ the androne answered. ‘The glide turned in accordance with God’s directions.’

‘You are sure God gave us the right directions?’ I asked, a sudden dreadful thought rising to the surface of my mind. ‘We are truly following the path taken by Kelver Rhonin?’

Hendon answered calmly, ‘Yes, User Seeker. These directions are identical to those God gave Kelver Rhonin.’

The others were converging on Hendon from all over the glide as I wondered aloud why we had not flown directly west the moment we reached the sea.

‘There can only be one answer to that,’ Ana said. ‘Our destination must be on
this landmass
so there would not have been any point in turning sooner.’

Dragon’s face lit up. ‘We have turned towards Redport!’

‘We must not jump to conclusions,’ I cautioned, wary of her delight. ‘It may be that God sent us this way to avoid something that was here in the Beforetime, or we may be going this way so that we can go in another direction without running into a mountain. The point is that we do not know anything about what lies ahead, regardless of what God’s map says.’

‘And whether we go east or west or even north, if we go on, we will eventually come to the end of the map,’ Swallow said, giving Dragon a sympathetic look.