“Well, now,” Elii said sourly.
The Herder came up to stand uneasily beside him. “We will have to find another way,” he said. “Lud will lead us.”
Elii snorted rudely. “Your Lud had better help us on this path—there ain’t no other way.”
The priest’s face grew red, then white. “You go too far,” he gasped, but Elii was already preoccupied, drawing a length of rope from his pack and tying the end around a tree. Then he slung the other end down the flooded path.
The Herder watched these movements with a look of horror.
Elii pulled at the rope, testing it, before swinging agilely down to the bottom of the small waterfall. Back on dry ground, he called for us to do the same, one at a time.
“We’ll be dashed to pieces,” Rosamunde observed gloomily.
The Herder gave her a dark look as one of the boys started to climb carefully down. Several others went, then Rosamunde, then me. The rope was slippery now and hard to grip. I found it difficult to lift my own weight. Two-thirds of the way down, my fingers became too numb to cling properly, and I fell the last several handspans, crashing heavily into a rock as I landed. The water soaked into my trousers.
“Get her out. The water may be tainted,” Elii growled, then yelled up for the priest to descend.
I was completely breathless and dazed from my fall, and my head ached horribly where I had hit it on the rock.
“She’s bleeding,” Rosamunde told Elii.
“Won’t matter. Running blood cleans a wound,” he muttered absently, watching the priest descend slowly and with much crying out for Lud’s help. I felt as though I were watching through a mist.
When the Herder reached the bottom, he knelt beside me quickly and began reciting a prayer for the dead.
“She’s not dead,” Rosamunde said gently.
Seeing that I was only stunned, the priest bandaged the cut on my temple with deft efficiency, and I reminded myself again that for all his youth, the Herder was fully trained in his calling.
“Come on,” Elii said impatiently. “Though I doubt we’ll make it in time now.”
“Was the water tainted?” I asked. I ignored Rosamunde’s audible gasp. There was no point in caution if I died from not speaking out.
The Herder shook his head, and I wondered how he knew—though I did not doubt that he was right. Herder knowledge was wide-ranging and sometimes obscure, but generally reliable.
We walked quickly then, urged on by Elii. My head ached steadily, but I was relieved that it was only a bump and not a serious infection. I had a sudden vision of my mother, applying a steaming herb poultice to my head. How quickly the pain had subsided on that occasion. Herb lore was forbidden now, though it was said there were still those who secretly practiced the art.
I nearly walked into Elii, having failed to notice he had called a halt.
“Through the Weirwood lies the Silent Vale,” he said. “If we are too late today, we will have to camp here and enter the Vale tomorrow.”
“The Weirwood?” said someone nervously.
“It is dangerous to be out at night in these parts,” the Herder said, “where the spirits of the Beforetime rest uneasily.”
Elii shrugged, saying there would be no help for it if the sun had gone. He had his orders. “Perhaps your Lud will cast his mantle of protection over us,” he added with a faint glimmer of amusement.
We entered the Weirwood, and I shivered at the thought of spending a night there. It had an unnatural feel, and I saw several in our group look around nervously. We had not walked far when we came to a clearing, and in the center of this was the ravine they called the Silent Vale. It was very narrow, a mere slit in the ground, with steps hewn into one end, descending into the gap. The light reached just a handspan or so into the ravine, and the rest was in dense shadow.
I understood now Elii’s haste, for only when the sun was directly overhead would it light the Vale, and it was almost at its zenith now.
We entered the ravine and descended the slippery steps fearfully. By the time we reached the bottom, I was numb with the cold, and we huddled together at the foot of the steps, afraid to move where we could not see. Moments passed and the sun reached its zenith, piercing the damp mists that filled the ravine and lighting up the Vale.
It was much wider at the base, and unexpectedly, there were trees growing—though they were stunted and diseased, with few leaves. A thick whitish moss covered the ground and some of the walls in a dense carpet. Where the moss did not grow, the walls were scored and charred, possibly marked by the fire said to have rained from the skies during the first days of the holocaust. A faint stench of burning still filled the air.
Elii handed out the gloves and bags for gathering the whitestick, instructing us needlessly to be quick and careful and never to let the substance touch our skin. Pulling on the gloves, we spread out and set to work, searching for the telltale black nodules that concealed the deposits of whitestick.
The bags were small but took time to fill, because the substance crumbled to dust if not handled carefully. Standing to ease my aching back once I had finished, I noticed that I had wandered out of the sight of everyone else. I could hear nothing, though the others had to have been quite near. I had noticed at once the aptly named Vale was oddly silent, but now it struck me anew how unnatural that silence was, and how complete. Even the wind made no murmur. It was as if a special kind of death had come to the Silent Vale.
“Are you finished?” Rosamunde asked, apologizing when I jumped in fright. “This place is enough to give even a soldierguard a taste of the horrors,” she said.
Returning to where some of the others had gathered at the bottom of the steps, we heard voices nearby.
“What do they use this stuff for, anyway?” one asked.
“Medicines and such, or so they say,” said another voice with a bitter edge. It was the voice of the out-spoken girl marked with Herder red. “But I have heard rumors the priests use it to make special poisons and to torture their prisoners for information,” she added softly.
Rosamunde looked at me in horror, but we said nothing. I was no informer, and I did not think Rosamunde was. But that girl was bent on disaster, and she would take anyone with her stupid enough not to see the danger. Better to forget what we had overheard.
I left Rosamunde with the others, going to examine a deep fissure in the ground. The Great White had savaged the earth, and there were many such holes and chasms leading deep into the ground. I bent and looked in, and a chill air struck at my face from those black depths.
Impulsively, I picked up a rock and dropped it in. My heart beat many times before I heard the faint report of impact.
“What was that?” cried the Herder, who had been packing the bags of whitestick.
Elii strode purposefully over. “Idiot of a girl. This is a serious place, not the garden at Kinraide. Throw yourself in next time and make me happy.” I looked at my feet with a fast-beating heart. Twice now I had called attention to myself, and that was dangerous.
Suddenly there was a vague murmur from the ground beneath our feet.
“What was that?” the Herder cried again, edging closer to the steps.
“I don’t know,” Elii said with a frown. “Probably nothing, but I don’t like it. After all, we are not far from the Blacklands. Come, the sun is going.”
We ascended the steps in a single file. The Herder, who came last, kept looking behind him fearfully as if he expected something to reach out and grab him.
An air of relief came over the group as we threw off the oppressive air of the Vale. Fortunately, we had gathered enough whitestick, and we made good time on our return, reaching Kinraide early in the evening.
To my private astonishment, Jes was among those who met us, and he wore the beaten potmetal armband of a Herders’ assistant.
2
“ELSPETH?”
It was Jes, and I willed him to go away. He knocked again, then stuck his head in t
he door. “How are you?” he asked with a hint of disapproval.
Anger overcame caution. “For Lud’s sake, Jes, they’re not going to condemn me because of a headache. If you think it looks suspicious, then why don’t you report me?” I retorted, staring pointedly at his armband.
He whitened and shut the door behind him. “Keep your voice down. There are people outside.”
I bit my lip and forced myself to be calm. “What do you want?” I asked him coldly. I knew I was being stupid, but I didn’t care. Jes was the only one I could strike out at. And that, I thought, looking at his stiff face, was becoming increasingly dangerous.
“Maybe you don’t care about being burned, but I do. Much as you scorn it, caution has kept us safe until now. No thanks to you,” he added, and I was bitterly reminded that our plight was my fault. “A headache is nothing, but you know how little things are blown out of all proportion. It is a short step from gossip to the Councilcourt in Sutrium.”
“You have been made an assistant,” I said flatly, and now he reddened. A look of pride mingled with shame came over his face. “How could you?” I asked him bleakly.
He clenched his jaw. “You will not ruin this for me,” he said at last. “It is my sin that I do not denounce you. But you are my sister.”
“You would not dare denounce me,” I said. “Your own life would be ruined if it was known you had a Misfit for a sister. Don’t pretend you care for me.”
A queer flicker passed over his face, and I suddenly felt certain that this was the truth.
When he had gone, I lay back, my head aching dully, partly from tension. For all my bravado, I was afraid of Jes. There had been a time when we were close. Not so much when we were young, for he had been a dutiful son, and I too much of a wanderer to please anyone except my beloved mother. But after we had come into the orphan home system following the trial and execution of our parents, we had clung to one another. Jes had vowed then to have revenge on the Council and the Herder Faction for their evil work that day. He had wiped my eyes and sworn to protect me.
He had not known what that would entail. In those first years, we regarded our secretive behavior as a game. It was only as we grew older that we became increasingly aware of the dangers. Discovering the truth about myself made me more solitary than ever, while Jes developed a near obsession with caution. In those days, his one desire had been to get a Normalcy Certificate and get out, then ask permission to have me with him. But somehow we had drifted apart, till the bonds that held us were fragile indeed. I knew Jes had become fascinated with the Herder Faction and its ideas. But as an orphan, he would never be accepted into the cloister, so I had thought little of it.
Recently, we had fought bitterly over his explanations for why the Herders had burned our parents. I had called him a traitor and a dogmatic fool; he in turn had called me a Misfit. That he would even say the word revealed how much he had changed.
Aside from Jes, people thought my recent headaches and bouts of light-headedness were the result of my fall on the path to Silent Vale that day, and I let them. I’d intended to hide the pain altogether, but I had cried out in the night, and the guardians had come to hear of it. In the end, I told them of my fall, because I did not want them to speculate, and had been given light duties and some bitter powders by the Herder.
If not the fall, then the headaches might have been simply a reaction to a change in the weather, for winds from the Blacklands did cause fevers and rashes. But deep down, I knew they had nothing to do with either the fall or the weather.
I shook my head and decided to go for a walk in the garden, slipping out a side door into the fading sunset. Jes had called me a Misfit, and according to Council lore, that was what I was. But I did not feel like a monster. In a queer mental leap, I thought about my first visit with my father to the great city of Sutrium. We had gone all that way for the fabulous Sutrium moon fair, and we weren’t alone. Everyone who could walk, hobble, or ride seemed to be on the road to the biggest town in the Land, bringing with them hay, wool, embroidery, honey, perfume, and a hundred other things to trade. They had come from Saithwold, Sawlney, Port Oran, Morganna, and even Aborium and Murmroth.
I had not known then that Sutrium was also the home of the main Councilcourt. That I had discovered on my grim second visit. There had been no fair then. It was wintertime, and the city was gray and cold. There were no gay crowds filling the streets, only a few people who had regarded us furtively as we passed in the open carriage, our faces stinging from the red dye. We had not known then that Henry Druid had only recently disappeared, fleeing the wrath of the Council, and that the entire community was fearful of the consequences, since many had known and openly agreed with the rebel. But what I did understand, even then, was the hatred and fear in the faces of the people who looked at us. I had felt the terror of being different that has never left me.
Shuddering, I thrust the grim memory away. Ludwilling, I would never see such looks again.
The time of changing was near, and I sighed, thinking it would be better for us both if Jes and I were sent this time to separate homes. The Herder told us that the custom of moving orphans around regularly from home to home had arisen to prevent friendships forming that could not be continued once leaving the system. But it was widely accepted that the changing was engineered to prevent alliances between the children of seditioners, which might lead to further trouble. And there was another effect, evident only when the time for the changing approached. No one knew where they might go and whom they might trust in the new home.
Even before the relocation, we learned to prepare mentally, withdrawing and steeling ourselves for the loneliness that would come until the new home was familiar, until it was possible to tell who could be trusted and who were the informers.
I looked up. It was growing dark, and soon I would have to go in. Fortunately, no one minded my wandering in the garden even on the coldest of days, but I never stayed out beyond nightfall—those dark hours belonged to the spirits of the Beforetime. I leaned against a statue of the founder of Kinraide. Here I was hidden from the windows by a big laurel tree, and it was my favorite place.
The moon had risen early, and the darkening sky made it glow. An unnatural weakness coursed through me. I felt a sticky sweat break out on my forehead and thought I was going to faint. The pain in my head made me stagger to my knees.
I tried to force the vision not to come, but it was impossible. I stared up at the moon. It had become a penetrating yellow eye. I knew that eye sought me, and I felt the panic rise within me.
Then, abruptly, there was only the pale moon. My headache was gone, as though it had been only a painful precursor to what I had just experienced. I shivered violently and stood up. I would not let myself wonder about the vision—nor the others that had preceded it. Jes had told me long ago, when we could still talk of such things, that only Herders were permitted visions. “You must not imagine that you have them,” he had said.
But I did not imagine them, either then or now, I thought, and walked shakily back across the garden. Yet though I did not try to understand what they meant, a few days later the meaning forced itself on me.
3
MARUMAN CONFIRMED IT in the end.
It had been a cold year overall despite the occasional muggy days that came whenever the wind blew in from the Blacklands. Most often even spring days were bitten with pale, frosted skies, which stretched away to the north and south and over the seas to the icy poles of the legends.
Sometimes in the late afternoon, I would sit and imagine the color fading out to where there was no color at all, as if the Great White again filled the skies, its lethal radiance leaching the natural blue. But unlike that age of terror when night was banished for days on end, I fancied the Land would be permanently frozen into the white world of wintertime, the sea afloat with giant towers of ice such as those in the stories my mother had told.
“Stories!” Maruman snorted as he came up, having overheard th
e last of my thoughts. I smiled at him as he joined me beside the statue of the founder. I scratched his stomach, and he rolled about and stretched with familiar abandon.
He was not a pretty cat nor a pampered one. His wild eyes were of a fierce amber hue, and he had a battered head and a torn ear. He once told me he had fought a village dog over a bone and that the hound had cheated by biting him on the head.
“Never can trust them pap-fed funaga lovers,” he had observed disdainfully. “Funaga” was the thought symbol he used for men and women. “And I’d no sooner trust a wild one anytime; it’d bite me in half at one go.”
Maruman possessed a dramatic and fanciful imagination. I thought perhaps that old war injury was to blame. Occasionally his thoughts would become muddled and disturbed. During those periods, he could dream very vividly. He had undergone such a fit shortly after we had begun to communicate, only to tell me that one day the mountains would seek me. I had laughed because it was such a strange image.
Another time he had confessed a Guanette bird had told him his destiny was twined with mine. This bird was used throughout the Land as a symbol representing an oracle-like wisdom or a preordained order of things. If there were meaning and reason behind the symbol, they were lost to me. The actual bird was said to be extinct. Yet Maruman quite often attributed his insights or notions to the direct intervention of the mythical wise bird.
Maruman was, he often told me, his own cat. Not so much wild, he would point out, as unencumbered. He once observed that life with a master was doubtless very nice, but for all that, he preferred his own way. Having a master, he said, seemed to take the stuffing out of a beast. I reflected to myself that this was certainly true. Despite this, and with a touch of cynicism, I thought that part of Maruman’s devotion to me was because I fed him.
There seemed little to love in this rude, unbalanced cat with an ear that looked half devoured. Yet there was a kind of wild joy about him that I could only envy, for I was far from free. If he had been human, I think he would have been a gypsy, and in fact he quite liked to visit the troupes that roved about. He told me they fed him scraps and sang rollicking songs and laughed more than other funaga.