The Keeping Place Read online

  Despite his estrangement from us, Domick had continued to send regular messages about matters he uncovered in his spying. I suspected he kept Brydda informed, too, for he had always respected the big rebel. But his messages had grown more and more cryptic.

  None of us who had seen Domick in recent times could doubt that he needed healing. He had become a living symbol of what it meant to act against our natures. Rushton intended to bring him back to Obernewtyn, but I did not think Domick would come.

  Thinking of Rushton made me feel his absence, despite what I had said to Freya. I missed him, not in the same way as I missed Dameon, but as if I hungered for food or water or some other essential need of life.

  Rushton would be amused to hear himself compared to bread or water, and the thought of his laughter assuaged some of my longing for him. He would understand my missing Dameon, for they had been close friends. So much so that Rushton had seemed to understand, far more than I, why Dameon had chosen to remain in Sador when we left to return to Obernewtyn.

  I felt a sudden coldness, for the sun had shifted as I sat there. I pulled my shawl about me and resumed my seat by the hearth. Ceirwan had lit a little blaze to warm the chill from the stones, and I added a few sticks of wood. Then I took Dameon‘s thick letter and flattened it on my knees, and once again the dry whisper of my fingers over the paper rose into the air.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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. 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.

  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, until they had rescued every last surviving Sadorian, and more women besides, many of whom were pregnant.

  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.

  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.

  I stopped reading, for a vision of the Farseeker ward, Matthew, rose in my mind. Dameon had been thinking of him as he bent over the page, and a wave of sadness flowed through me. Matthew’s abduction by slavers had been a grievous blow, and my only consolation was that, though I mourned him, he was not dead.

  I read on, but to my disappointment, Dameon wrote no more about slavery.

  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.

  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 b
ear 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.

  He went on to describe the immense trees and the many uses of the spice they produced. I let my fingers slide over the long description, eager for more of the mysterious Kasanda. In the labyrinthine tunnels of the Temple the previous year, I had been shown a chamber that housed a series of relief carvings of the Beforetime made by this Kasanda. Seeing them, I had understood for the first time that the Great White had not been a terrible accident but the inevitable conclusion to the arrogant, greedy, self-centered age of the Beforetimers.

  The stone carvings had been true works of art, but I had been struck by their resemblance to the wood carvings on the front doors to Obernewtyn and wished the latter had not been burned, so I could compare them. I had intended to look into their history, but more immediate matters had always demanded my attention.

  “It is your path/purpose to bring the funagaglarsh to the longsleep, ElspethInnle,” Maruman interrupted the flow of my thoughts pointedly. Glarsh was the beast thoughtsymbol for “machine.” I felt there was reproach in his single yellow eye.

  “I have sworn to find the glarsh and bring them to the longsleep, but the old Ones have bid me wait,” I sent.

  Maruman merely laid his chin on one paw and closed his eye.

  I shrugged. I needed no reminder of the dark road I must walk, for it was foretold that if I failed, one would come whose destiny was to resurrect the Beforetime weaponmachines and their deadly potential, bringing the poor, battered world to a final doom. I could not imagine why this Destroyer would wish to unmake the world, since it must mean his own doom as well. Perhaps, like the Gadfian fanatics Dameon had spoken of, he believed his reward would come after death.

  Or maybe he was no more captain of his fate than I of mine.

  3

  “ROLAND BEGAN IT,” Ceirwan said over his shoulder as he preceded me down the narrow spiral of stairs. “He accused Miryum of pursuin’ a selfish vision of glory to th’ detriment of Obernewtyn an’ said she mun as well be takin’ coin from th’ Council fer her work against us.”

  “He said that?” I muttered, but I did not doubt it. Roland was blunt and choleric at the best of times.

  “Miryum asked if he was calling her a traitor, and he said he was calling her a fool but that she was too stupid to realize it. She said she pursued glory in order to make unTalented folk revere Misfits. You know how pompous she can be these days….”

  I knew. Since our return from Sador, we had applied ourselves to the problem of rendering ourselves less abhorrent to the unTalented folk of the Land, in the hope that they would someday come to accept us. Each guild had found its own means of approaching the matter.

  The Empath guild had decided that they would use their abilities wherever they traveled to encourage people to feel compassion for others. More dramatically, they and the coercers had worked together to manipulate dreams so that unTalented people could momentarily experience life as hunted and reviled Misfits. During the last guildmerge, there had been a long discussion about the nature of dreams and whether or not manipulating them was any more immoral than writing a song about events that had passed, reshaping them for effect. The matter was yet unresolved, but it had become a favored topic of debate.

  The Coercer guild had begun creating teaching entertainments for unTalented children using simple songs and jokes, good puppetry, and acrobatics, which made use of their hard-won physical skills. The few times they had so far performed, they had disguised themselves as halfbreed gypsies and called themselves magi. Unlike true gypsy performances, the magi show had hidden depth; beneath the jokes and stories there was always some subtle lesson designed to make the audience examine their prejudices.

  Miryum had devised her own way of changing people’s thinking after reading a Beforetime book about warriors who rode about their land performing noble deeds. Inspired by these knights, who had lived by a system of ethics called chivalry, Miryum had begun riding out regularly wearing a black mask, performing good deeds, and preaching her code of chivalry to anyone who would listen. Before long, several of the younger and more volatile coercers, chafing under our new vow of pacifism, had joined Miryum’s expeditions.

  No one had done anything at first, in the hope that her zeal would fade. But gossip about her eventually reached even Sutrium, and a warning came from Domick that the Council was becoming interested in talk of the mysterious coercer-knights.

  Ceirwan and I came onto a narrow path that ran from the kitchen garden to the maze courtyard, and we heard Roland bellowing. “Blasted woman. You will see us all dead with your antics!”

  Coming round the corner, I had a clear view of the craggy Healer guildmaster glaring ferociously at Miryum. Behind the stocky Coercer guilden were two of her coercer-knights, identifiable by the black scarves around their necks that doubled as masks. Beside Roland stood the Healer ward, Kella, a long-suffering look on her delicate features. A group of goggling youngsters stood around them.

  “What is going on?” I demanded.

  Roland jabbed his head toward me. “You try to make her see sense!” he growled. “She dares to claim that she is doing no worse than my healers in galloping about the Land playing the heroine!”

  “Do you say we should not help people in need?” Miryum asked frostily.

  “I am saying you might consider the value of a little discretion!” Roland shouted.

  “To be discreet would defeat our purpose,” the Coercer guilden said with composure.

  “You are naive beyond belief,” Roland said.

  “Miryum.” I intervened firmly before the Healer guildmaster gave up on words and throttled the coercer. “Is it not true that at the last guildmerge, the coercers agreed to restrain the activities of the knights, given that they could cause the Council to resurrect its plan to set up a soldierguard outpost in the highlands?”

  “Gevan agreed to that suggestion, not the knights,” Miryum said.

  “Are your blasted knights not coercers, who should obey their guildmaster? Or do you think to replace him?” Roland raged.

  Miryum did not rise to the jibe. “I do not wish to take Gevan’s place, but my philosophy and that of my fellow knights sits uneasily within the charter of the Coercer guild. I do not wish to undermine the guild’s work, but I think more is needed to change the status of Misfits in the Land than teaching plays. If people fear us because they see us as superior to themselves, we must ensure they know that we will use our abilities for the betterment of all who dwell in the Land.”

  Roland almost danced with fury. “Gevan’s plays are subtle, and people will not resist what he teaches because they do not know they are being taught. But your performances are as delicate as a hammer blow! Not only that, but they also indicate that we see ourselves as an elite. Do you think that will incline people to look on us with favor?”

  “The people we aid are genuinely grateful,” Miryum said with rather touching dignity.

  I could not help but admire her aplomb, but like Roland, I thought exaggerated heroics far too simple an approach to an old and complex problem.

  “Miryum,” I said sternly. “Gevan is guildmaster of the coercers, and in your guild’s name, he made an undertaking to Rushton. As a coercer sworn to that guild, and an office bearer within it, you are bound by its rulings. Are you not also bound by your own code of chivalry, which demands that your word be as enduring as stone?”

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nbsp; Miryum was silent, and the color rose slowly in her cheeks. “You are right,” she said simply. “We will not ride out again until this matter is resolved.” She bowed to me and then to Roland, and departed, followed by the two other coercer-knights.

  “Say what ye will of Miryum, but this code of hers bestows great dignity,” Ceirwan murmured as the children drifted back to their games.

  Roland gave the Farseeker guilden a black look before stalking away.

  “What on earth started it this time?” I sighed.

  “Roland went into Darthnor and was questioned by a rabble of miners as to whether he had seen this band of murderin’ masked rebels sent out by Henry Druid,” Kella said softly.

  “But Henry Druid is dead!” I said, taken aback. The rebel Herder priest had perished in the White Valley in a terrible firestorm that destroyed most of his followers along with his secret encampment. “Where would such rumors come from?”

  “I dinna ken, but Roland is right in sayin’ it will make things difficult in the highlands if people start becomin’ jumpy,” Ceirwan said.

  A young teknoguilder had been among those watching the confrontation. I called him over before he could leave and asked if he or others of his guild had noticed anyone snooping about the White Valley. The Druid’s encampment there had been secret, but there had been rumors aplenty. If there were soldierguards in the highlands looking for him, that was where they would go.

  The teknoguilder said that he had not heard of anyone wandering around, but that in any case Garth had most of them in the city under Tor. They had learned that the Reichler Clinic had kept its most important records in the basement of the building that housed the Reception Center.