The Seeker (4 page)

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

M
ARUMAN 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 the 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.

The bond between Maruman and myself had been the catalyst through which I had discovered the full extent of my telepathic powers. He said it had been destiny, but I doubted it.

I had been seated right next to the statue of the founder when it happened. A scraggy-looking cat was stalking a bird. I would have ignored them both, except that I was so struck by the carelessness of the bird. I thought it almost deserved its fate. As I concentrated on the pursuit, I suddenly had the sensation of something moving in my head. It was the queerest feeling, and I gasped loudly.

Startled, the bird flew off with an irritated chirp. I had saved the wretched creature’s life, and it was annoyed! It did not yet occur to me to wonder how I knew what the bird felt. Instead I noticed that the cat seemed to glare indignantly at me with its bright yellow eyes. I shrugged wryly, and it looked away and began to clean itself.

I had the notion it was only pretending to ignore me. Then I laughed, thinking I must have sat too long in the sun. The cat turned to face me again, and for a moment I imagined a glint of amusement in its look. I wondered if maybe Jes was right and I was going mad.

“Stupid funaga,” said a voice in my head. I somehow knew it was the cat and stared at it in shock. “All funaga are stupid.” Again I had heard what it was thinking.

“They are not!” I answered without opening my mouth. Now it was the cat’s turn to stare.

That first moment of mutual astonishment had given way to a curiosity about each other that had in time grown to an enduring friendship. Once we had overcome our initial
disbelief and began to pool our knowledge, Maruman revealed that all beasts were capable of mindspeaking together as we did, sensing emotions and images as well as brief messages, though typically not so deeply or intimately. He said animals had been able to do so in a limited way even before the holocaust, which, interestingly, he, too, called the Great White.

I told him my one piece of knowledge about the link between animals and humans, gleaned from a Beforetime book my mother had read. It had claimed humans evolved from some hairy animals called apes, which no longer existed as far as I knew, but neither Maruman nor I could feel that was more than a fairy tale.

I had heard many stories about the Great White from my parents as a child, which were different than the stories told by the Herders once I entered the orphan home system.

I remembered little from my childhood, but Herder lessons about the Great White and Beforetime were driven into us during the daily rituals and prayers, exhorting us to seek purity of race and mind. The priest who dealt with such matters at Kinraide was old, with a sharp eye and a hard hand. His manner of preaching often reduced new orphans to screaming hysteria. He made the Beforetime sound like some terrifying concoction of heaven and hell, woven throughout with sloth, indulgence, and pride: the sins suffered by the Oldtimers. The holocaust itself was paraded as the wrath of Lud in all its terrible glory.

This fearful picture was tempered by the stories one heard from other sources, gypsies and traveling jacks and potmenders, who presented the Oldtimers to us as men who flew through the air in golden machines and could live and breathe beneath the sea. Those stories left little doubt that the
Beforetime people had possessed some remarkable abilities, however fantasized and exaggerated the details had become.

Maruman had little to offer about the Beforetime. He had more to say about the Great White. Dismissing the Herder version, Maruman said the beastworld believed that men had unleashed the Great White from things they called machines—powerful and violent inanimate creatures set deep under the ground, controlled and fed by men. Beasts called them glarsh.

I questioned him as to how inanimate things could be violent or fed, but he could not explain this apparent paradox.

Maruman said he “remembered” the Great White, and though that was impossible, he wove remarkably frightening pictures of a world in terror. He spoke of the rains that burned whatever they touched, and of the charnel stench. He spoke of the radiant heat that filled the skies and blotted out the night, of the thirst and the hunger and the screaming of those dying, of the invisible poisons that permeated the air and plants and waters of the world. And most of all, he spoke of the deaths of men, children, and women, and of the deaths of beasts, and when I listened, I wept with him, though I did not know if he had imagined it all or if he was somehow really able to remember something he had not seen firsthand.