The Dreamtrails (104 page)

I lay back on my bed. Kasanda had said that she had defied time twice and in more than one way. What could that possibly mean? And what had she meant by saying it had cost her much to obtain the small computermachine? I could only imagine that she had brought it with her on her journey across the sea to the Red Queen’s land, but if so, how had she managed to keep it with her when she was taken by the Gadfian raiders? Unless she had obtained it while she was their captive. Indeed, it might even be the reason she had allowed them to take her.

I rolled onto my stomach and looked at Maruman, who had curled to sleep on the end of my bedroll, and I wondered again about the young woman who had called him Merimyn and how Kasanda had known that name. She must have foreseen his play on the dreamtrails, but why use that slight distortion of his name?

I pushed the stone sword out of sight between my bedroll and the side of the tent. I had no fear that it would be stolen. The penalties for theft were very severe in Sador, because all crime was regarded as theft. I lay staring up into the darkness of the tent roof, feeling more and more awake. Finally, I gave up trying to sleep and decided to bathe in the clear pool at the base of the cliffs. It was but a few minutes’ walk away, and the moment the idea came to me, I yearned to feel water on my hot sticky skin. I stripped off my silken clothes, drew on the wrap Kaman had given me earlier, and walked barefoot from the tent over sand still warm from the day, Maruman padding lightly beside me.

I had thought to swim alone, and I was startled and disappointed to see a large crowd of young women already swimming. Their easy nakedness, the lack of men, and the
giddy horseplay puzzled me, given the lateness of the hour, but the thought of a swim was too enticing to turn back. I walked to the edge of the pool, shrugged off the wrap, and entered the water. Its embrace was like cold silk, and I sighed with pleasure.

“Greetings, Elspeth,” called a voice, and I opened my eyes to see Bruna swimming languidly toward me.

“An odd hour for so many to swim,” I said.

“You might call it an informal ritual,” Bruna said. “You see, in an hour or so, many of these women will be hunted, so they cool their blood in readiness to make themselves elusive.”

I remembered then what Jakoby had told me and said as lightly as I could, “Will you take part in this hunt?”

“I must, for three stones in my mother’s bowl had my name on them,” she said, tossing her sleek braided head, the beads and silver cuffs giving out a silvery music. “Probably it is no more than curiosity on the part of the men who scribed my name, for I have been away a long time.” Her tone was cool and certain, and I wondered what she would say if I told her that Dardelan may have left one of the stones.

Of course I did not, for it was none of my business to meddle with a mother’s meddling. Besides, maybe Dardelan had
not
put a stone in the bowl. Indeed, when I thought of him, he was always surrounded by maps and books and laws and quills, serious and preoccupied by the weighty business of governing the Land; I could not imagine anyone less like a hunter than the bookish young high chieftain.

We swam together companionably for a time, and I asked if she had heard anything of Miryum and Straaka. Being in Sador had made me wonder again what had become of the Coercer guilden and the body of her Sadorian suitor since
their disappearance after Malik’s betrayal in the White Valley. Bruna said she had asked about the pair upon her return to the desert lands, for Straaka had been one of her tribesmen, but no one had seen them. One of the kasanda, however, had told her that the pair walked together still, though not under the moon or sun. I asked what this meant, and Bruna said she deemed it to mean that they walked together in death. This thought sloughed away the languid mood I had fallen into, and I climbed out to find Maruman curled on my robe, his yellow eye fixed on the full moon. Bruna climbed out, too, and stretched out unself-consciously on the warm sand.

“Lie down,” she encouraged. “The warm sand is very pleasant, and once you are dry, you brush it off and your skin is gently scoured to silk.” Other women lounged all about the pool, and after a slight hesitation, I lay down alongside Bruna. As she had promised, the sand felt wonderfully warm and soft, and I relaxed. Beside me, Bruna sighed and closed her eyes. I slept for a time and woke when Bruna rose and began to brush off the sand. I bestirred myself and did the same, judging from the moon that almost two hours had passed.

When we had both dressed, she suggested I come with her for some food. “The tents will be serving food all night tonight because of the hunt,” she said.

The tents and cook fires were busier than ever, but as we approached them, I realized I had no tokens or any coin to exchange for them. Bruna waved aside my confession and brought us both hot berry pastries and minted water. We ate and drank standing, watching two small women with honey-colored skin and deeply slanted eyes tumble and roll with an agility that Merret would have gasped to see. We were interrupted by a long mournful note that swelled in the air.

“That is the signal to tell the hunted that they have an hour before the hunt begins. An hour before I teach some warriors to eat my dust,” Bruna said, her golden eyes glimmering with contempt. Fleetingly, I saw the wild, haughty child-woman who had first come with her mother to the Land. Then she smiled. “I have enjoyed your company, Elspeth.”

“And I yours,” I said, wondering if Dardelan would take part in the hunt and how she would feel when she discovered it. “Good luck,” I added, but she was already sprinting away on long lean legs.

“You ought to have said,
Run wild and never submit unless you choose
,” said a voice.

It was the Druid’s armsman Daffyd, standing beside me clad in loose Sadorian robes.

“Da-Daffyd!” I stammered, gaping at him. “What are
you
doing here?”

His smile faded into a grim determination. “Doing what I have been doing since Ariel sold Gilaine, my brother, and Lidgebaby to Salamander.”

“But Salamander has never been here,” I said.

“I am not so sure,” Daffyd said darkly, glancing around.

I stared at him, taking in his gaunt look and haunted eyes. “Why do you think he would come here?” I asked gently.

Instead of answering, he said, “I have just been speaking to Rushton. He told me what has been happening on the west coast and in the Norselands. That was a fine set of victories. He told me, too, about Domick. It aches my heart to think of it.”

I sighed heavily and told him it ached mine, too, but I did not want to speak of the coercer. The hours I had spent with Bruna had lightened my heart, and I did not want to plunge into grief again so soon.

So I said, “Why would Salamander come to Sador knowing
he would be despised as a thief of freedom, captured, and sentenced to the desert walk?”

“I don’t think he came here as a slaver,” Daffyd said with such certainty that I was taken aback.

“You think he came in disguise?” I asked.

“I think if he came here, it would not be in any disguise, because what he wears the rest of the time is a disguise. I think he came as himself.
As a Sadorian tribesman
.”

“You think Salamander is
Sadorian
?” I demanded incredulously. “The Sadorians despise slavers even more than murderers.”

“True, most Sadorians hate slavers as they hate murderers,” Daffyd said. “But do you think there are no Sadorian murderers?”

“I see what you are saying,” I said more moderately. “But what makes you think Salamander is a tribesman?”

We went to sit on a dune slightly apart from the press about the stalls, and Maruman slipped from my shoulders into my lap.

“I didn’t come here originally to find Salamander,” Daffyd said. “I came here because there was no way to reach the west coast from the Land after the rebellion. My plan was to board one of the vessels that fish the waters along the edge of the strait and bribe the shipmaster to let me slip overboard and swim to the west coast.”

“But you could not find a ship that would take you?” I prompted, weary enough to feel impatient with the circumlocutions of his tale.

“The rumors that fishing boats went that far from Sador proved untrue. Once I realized there was no way to reach the west coast from here, any more than from the Land, I was disheartened. There seemed no reason to go back to the Land as
long as the Suggredoon remained closed, so I worked as an aide to one of the traders who stays here all year round, serving the odd seaman and trading with the Sadorians who wander by. I was so much into the habit of thinking about Salamander that I went on doing it, and gradually I started to wonder why he had never attacked any of the Sadorian greatships save the one he destroyed at Sutrium, and why he had never come here.”

“Because he is a slaver and the Sadorians loathe slavery,” I said.

“Listen,” Daffyd said, and now he suddenly changed the subject and began to tell of a good hire he had been offered to go into the desert with a kar-avan. The story was fascinating enough that I did not interrupt, but finally he said that on this trip he had heard something that made him question the prevailing belief that Salamander was from the Red Queen’s land.

This startled me out of my irritation, for I had always assumed Salamander had come from the Land until recently, when it had occurred to me that he might be of Gadfian stock. I advanced my own theory, but Daffyd merely shook his head and went on with his kar-avan tale. He said that halfway through the trip, he had become friendly with the bondmate of a Sadorian who had eventually confided to him that she was originally from the Land.

“I asked how she had come to be bonded to a tribesman. I suspect she had never told her tale, and maybe my being from the Land led her to confide it. She said she had been a shipgirl aboard one of the small vessels that the
Black Ship
had attacked. As was usual in those days, Salamander boarded the ship and took all passengers and shipfolk aboard the
Black Ship
to sell as slaves, save one, who was blindfolded and put into a ship boat with the tiller tied so that it would eventually reach land
if it did not capsize. The aim, of course, was that, if the man did reach the Land safely, he would tell his tale and spread a terror of the
Black Ship
to make other ships much more inclined to surrender at once. Sometimes Salamander claimed the ship he had captured, but more often than not he simply scuttled it, as he had done this time, and departed.

“Unbeknownst to Salamander, the woman from the kar-avan had climbed over the edge of the ship on a dangling rope, and she clung to it grimly through the battle. She knew it was Salamander’s practice to release a single person in a ship boat, and her idea was to swim after it and climb aboard. But she didn’t dare swim to it at once, for fear of being seen. She waited until the
Black Ship
was far away before she dived from the last bit of the ship poking up from the water and swam after the ship boat.” He shook his head and added that it had been carried almost out of her sight, and from the woman’s account, it had been a long, desperately hard swim to reach it. The whole time, she had been in mortal terror of sharks or of losing sight of the ship boat in the gathering darkness and the high waves. But luckily the moon had risen, and knowing she would die if she did not reach the boat had given her strength and determination. Reaching the ship boat at last, she had dragged herself into it, untied the man, and between them they managed to paddle the boat into a coastal current that brought them here. The man went back to the Land, but the woman stayed in the desert lands and changed her name, terrified that the vengeful and fanatically secretive Salamander would come after her.

“You see, when she was dangling from that bit of rope, the two ships were side by side for a time, and right after the battle, when her shipmates were being marched across a plank onto the
Black Ship
, she saw a queer thing through a porthole
in the
Black Ship
. Salamander strode into a cabin, gloved, masked, and swathed in trousers and greatcoat as usual, clutching at his belly. When he took his hand away, his vest was red with blood. The great half-naked slave who tends him took out a needle and thread, and Salamander lifted up his shirt to let the man sew the gash. It was a bloody wound but not a mortal one, but here’s the thing: the woman said Salamander’s
belly was as brown as choca
.”

“He is Gadfian,” I murmured, imagining the woman hanging precariously between the ships, holding her breath, and praying not to be crushed or noticed.

Daffyd went on. “My first thought on hearing he was brown-skinned was that Salamander must be Sadorian, but I could not understand why he would be so fanatically secretive if he was, given that the
Black Ship
never visited here. That is when it came to me. He would not care that he was seen and recognized as a Sadorian
unless he wanted to be able to come back here
.”

I asked breathlessly, “Have you told this to any of the Sadorians?”

He shook his head impatiently. “I did not care about accusing Salamander to the tribe. I just wanted to use him to go to the Red Queen’s land to rescue my brother, Gilaine, and the others. If I could find out who he was, I could slip aboard his ship. I figured he must use one of those vessels he had taken in the strait, since he could not simply come sailing up in the
Black Ship
without being instantly identified as a slaver. I set myself the task of learning if there were any Sadorians who vanished for periods and then reappeared. It was a near impossible quest given that the Sadorians are nomads, but what else had I to do?

“Then not an hour ago, I bumped into Rushton, who told
me he is here because he is trying to mount an expedition to the Red Queen’s land before the next wintertime. I asked if I could join, and he said that he saw no reason why I should not come but that I must present my request to Dardelan and Gwynedd, who are high chieftains of the Land now, for they would be the masters of the expedition. Rushton told me that he is to address the tribal council tonight, and he wants me to come with him and tell what I have learned of Salamander. He believes the Sadorians’ profound loathing of slavery might sway them in favor of this expedition, since they would protect their land from the slavemasters by participating, and they would have the opportunity to capture Salamander and learn who he is.” He frowned. “I suppose you know that the slavemasters are Gadfians?”