The Rebellion (61 page)

These Sadorians have memories that go back beyond the Great White. They are not passed on as written words in books but as spoken chants. This is a risky way of saving memories, it seems to me. But Sadorians do not believe the past should be remembered too well. The Temple overguardian says that if it is adored overmuch, the present is deemed less important
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I suspect this philosophy of holding lightly to the past arose from the Sadorians’ own history. Their ancestors came from some distant place called Gadfia, where a savage Lud was worshipped. The Gadfians thought that if they were killed fighting for their Lud, they would be taken directly to dwell with him in splendor. Since there were many of them and they were very poor, I have no doubt heaven often seemed more attractive than life. Perhaps for this reason they held life very cheap. The only reason humans existed was to worship Lud and to force others to worship him, so men were counted important because they were warriors. Women were only the means of getting sons. They were considered much as the unTalents of our Land think of beasts and were owned utterly by the man to whom
their father gave them. Daughters were considered worthless except as material for barter or to seal alliances, and many were killed
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Eventually, a group of defiant women and the men who dared aid them fled and journeyed to the desert country where they now dwell. They feared pursuit, so they dwelt as nomads to ensure they could no more be sieged or tracked than could the grains of sand that shift on the side of the desert dunes. I think much of their philosophy of leaving the earth untouched grew out of their fear of being followed. But their beliefs are no less profound for all that. They came to love the desert’s barren emptiness, because there were no marks of human dominance on it
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In the end, it was the Great White that prevented immediate pursuit. The Sadorians think of it almost as the saving of them, because Sador was virtually untouched, though lands on all sides of it were laid waste. Unlike the Land, Sador was completely isolated by Blacklands and mountains and sea. No refugees came there, and they lived untroubled by the outer world. The Sadorians think of that time, which we call the Age of Chaos, as a golden time, but their chants reveal that they suffered internal struggles. They split into tribes, and there were skirmishes and a number of bloody engagements and then something worse. It seems there was a Beforetime weapon of some description, either found by the Sadorians or brought with them when they fled Gadfia, and this was used to devastating effect
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Left alone, the Sadorians may have gone the way of the very Gadfians they had fled. But their isolation was not to last. Eventually, during the one season that the tribes converged on the coast for fishing purposes, they were descended upon by five ships full of Gadfian warriors
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The Sadorians were completely unprepared. Many were killed, mostly men, and over a hundred women stolen. But the invaders had underestimated the Sadorians, for the tribes managed to prevent one of the ships from leaving, and they used this as a pattern to build two of their own. Eventually, the newly united Sadorians took warriors from each tribe and set off in search of the Gadfian settlement. They found the Land at this time, but for months all else they saw was Blacklands, including what had been Gadfia
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The Sadorians at last found small settlements along the coast, separated by Blacklands. A raid was made on one of them, and the Sadorians learned that these settlements were called New Gadfia. The men there were desperate for sons to carry on their holy war, for since the Great White, they had been unable to conceive healthy children—and as a result, they had beaten or stoned their own women to death for imagined offenses against Lud
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Of course, both the men and the women of Gadfia had been afflicted by the poisons of the Great White, so the stolen Sadorian women had also produced deformed babies
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Unable to accept that their own monstrous seed was to blame, the men decided that Lud was offended by their use of unbelievers. The Sadorian women who had not been slain must be “instructed” in the faith. The birth of a deformed baby was taken as proof that Lud had rejected the mother. Already, many had been killed along with their poor, misshapen babies
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Horrified, the Sadorians attacked the three largest settlements on three consecutive nights and took them without losing a single person. They tried the leaders before a court of women and carried out executions. The Sadorians continued to plunder the smaller settlements
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until they had rescued every last surviving Sadorian, and more women besides, many of whom were pregnant
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They returned to Templeport in triumph almost two years after they had first set out. The gravid women could not travel, and so the cliffs, riddled with caves and tunnels, became the first and only permanent dwelling in Sador. All of the children born of the stolen women were deformed and many died. Those who did not were cared for tenderly and later became the first Temple guardians
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Now I wonder if the slaver Salamander sells human cargo to whoever remains in New Gadfia, for the Sadorians did not destroy all the settlements nor kill all the men. Of course, lacking children, they ought long ago to have died out, but what if they gave up stealing women and bought children instead, to raise as their own? As Gadfians? The thought chills me
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Elspeth, there are times when I am lost in these people and their lives. I work alongside the Temple guardians, caring for the sick, aware of the tragic irony that they themselves are dying slowly. Fian is sometimes shocked to see their deformities, and his emotional reactions tell me some are truly dreadful. I do not see them. I know the
guardians only by their gentle hands or soft voices, and so they are fair to me. Fian says that after a little, he cannot see ugliness in them either, but I do not wonder why they keep themselves covered when they move among outsiders. Even now that they have lost interest in Sador, the Herders might be driven by their fear of mutants to force the Council to attack the Earthtemple if they learned the guardians are all deformed. I have still not been able to find out why it is so. Guardians are celibate by choice and so do not bear children, which means the deformities cannot be hereditary
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Their recent history is one of gentleness and wisdom, and this is due at least in part to the influence of a woman they rescued from the New Gadfians—whom they call Kasanda. She was very ill when they brought her to Sador, for she was not young and had been savagely beaten over and over. Not for failing to bear a normal child—she was too old for that—but for defending the women. I wish I could learn more of her. She was no Gadfian; that much is clear. She had a profound effect on the Sadorians, teaching them to heal even as they healed her, but whence came the knowledge she taught them of healing and of other things? What did she say to unite the tribes and draw them finally away from the warlike path of their ancestors, and how did she convince them to establish the cliff caves as the Earthtemple? For that was her idea as well. The Sadorians will not speak of her to me, and I do not know why, for they are entirely open about all else. I have even been taken to their precious spice groves
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