by Jack
‘He loved you,’ the woman had accused.
‘He was my brother and I loved him too,’ Hannah had answered calmly, Nell hanging onto her skirt now and staring wide-eyed at the strangers.
‘He asked if we would go on calling to see if you had any need,’ the woman said, with less anger. ‘This is his son, Rally. When he grows he will be D’rekta of the Twenty-families.’
‘Come as you like,’ Hannah answered, smiling at the little boy. ‘Pasture in winter if you will.’ Much to her surprise, the troop had come to Mellow Farm to winter the next year, and from time to time thereafter even when the Twentyfamilies came to have a wild and infamous name and gave up breeding with any but their own. But the visits stopped after Rally came of age and his mother died of plague one year when the troop was on the West Coast.
* * * *
All that had been long ago when Hannah woke the morning after Daisy’s tenth birthday, having dreamed of the yellow-eyed cat that Cassandra used to weave and send to play in her dreams, pretending she had nothing to do with it. In the dream, the cat was older like her, and he had lost one eye. It glared yellow as the cat told her in his imperious crotchety way that she must go to the high mountains, for it was time to walk the dark road.
‘A dream,’ she insisted to herself, but whether a dream or a sending from Cassandra, wherever she was, Hannah took out the letter and read it again to the place where she had been bidden to stop reading so many years before.
‘Read no more of this, for your heart’s sake,’ her mother had written, ‘until your first grandchild turns ten.’
Now, Hannah read on, and her heart sank, for this next section of the letter again bade her follow, which meant she must travel up into the high mountains. A chill flickered through her as she read that on no account must she remain at Mellow Farm, for death would come soon for her here if she did, and she would not be the only one it carried off. Hannah wanted to scoff but the words frightened her as she wondered what her mother had foreseen for her and her family if she stayed. To go up to the high mountains was surely another road to death, for it was common knowledge that the pass and the high mountains were tainted with deadly poisons left over from the Great White that had destroyed the Beforetimers world. But at least Nell and her family would be safe.
At length, Hannah came again to a place where her mother bade her cease reading, this time until she should see the Beforetime city at the end of the Black road. She was not tempted to read more. She folded the read and unread pages together and wiped the tears away before getting to her feet. She stretched her back to get the kinks out, dressed and took out the pack she had borne when she met Mellow. She put into it a few clothes, several water gourds, some food that would keep and then she pulled on her stout walking boots. Dace had gone out already to see to the milking and Nell who was quiet and watchful like her father, had observed her preparations in silence.
She cooked up a pot of porridge and served it with dried fruit and honey from Tarry’s bees. That seemed an omen and Hannah slipped the rest of the pot, well corked, in a side pocket, for luck.
They ate together from the good bowls that had come out of Nell’s last glazing, for she had taken up her mother’s craft. Replete and finding no excuse to linger, Hannah rose with a sigh and let her daughter help her on with her pack. She had explained that she wanted to see if she could learn the truth of her mother’s death. Maybe talk to someone who had seen her walking higher up. She would like to carve a stone with her name on the grave, if she could find it.
‘Steer clear of that new settlement at Darthnor,’ Nell said. ‘They have a priest there now and he is full of fire and brimstone, Dace heard tell.’
‘I will,’ Hannah said, taking up Mellow’s old goat staff and they walked side by side and hand in hand to the gate, Daisy holding Nell’s hand and the two dogs flanking them, wanting to know where Hannah was going and if they could come.
‘Not where I go,’ she had told them silently. ‘Stay and watch over Nell and Daisy.’
Nell had given that sideways look she always got when Hannah spoke telepathically to beasts, making her wonder if her daughter, too, had a touch of the same ability. But Nell never mentioned it, and it was better not spoken of in these times with the Faction priests growing bold and striding about the towns with their bald heads and fierce scouring eyes, calling it a sin to be different.
Well it had been the cause of woe in her mother’s time, too, from what she had heard, she thought, embracing Nell and Daisy. Nell had held her tight for a moment before releasing her and Hannah had known that the girl understood that they would not see one another again.
Was it any less cruel for a mother to go off and leave her children grown than to leave them when they were young? Hannah wondered as she set off. Her own mother had left her at Stonehill when she was a child and Hannah had suffered, for all Cassandra had loved and cared for her as a daughter. But as a woman, she understood that a mother might not always have a clear choice. And for all her own sorrow at leaving her daughters and her grandchild, a part of her rejoiced in setting off on an adventure and leaving all domestic duties behind her. No more washing dishes or mending clothes or making beds or listening to Dace lecture about the Councilman of Guanette.
Just the road stretching away into mystery.
* * * *
Her mother had spoken of the Black road for as long as Hannah could remember. She even had a dim recollection of her arguing about it with the tall handsome bronze-skinned warrior who had fallen in love with Cassandra and wed her with the blessing of his blazingly beautiful sister, Aquilla. Luthen — that had been his name — had asked why his wife should travel the dark road that Hannah’s mother foresaw for herself.
* * * *
‘I did not say that Cassandra will walk the Black road with me,’ Mama told him in her cold way. ‘Only that our paths have marched side by side for a very long time, and that they will not diverge in this land.’
‘She is my wife,’ Luthen said.
‘She is more than that, and the son she will bear you and all the children your sister bears will serve the future even as Cassandra and I are sworn to do.’
At these words, Hannah reached up to touch the hand of her formidable mother, and when those rose-brown eyes looked down at her, she said, ‘And me? Will I serve the future too, Mama?’
She had seen that her mother had been about to shake her head, but instead her eyes had widened and she had become so pale that Hannah had become frightened.
‘Hannah?’ Luthen had asked softly, all the anger gone out of him, for he and his sister and their people revered those who could see the future almost as much as they revered those who could commune telepathically with beasts. Luthen had not meant her in speaking that name, Hannah had known, but Mama, for their name was the same.
Mama turned back to the tail warrior and Hannah saw pity in her face. ‘Your wife will travel from this land with me, Luthen. She will bear your son in a distant land, and leave him in that land when he is grown, to go to another. She will never return to any land where she has been before. Her way is always onward as she prepares for the one who will come. But she will never walk the dark road. It is my daughter who will walk on the Black road with me, as my husband did before me, and as the Seeker will do after us.’
‘If Cassandra will go from this land with you, then I will go too,’ Luthen said, softly.
‘You will not leave this land with her,’ Mama said, but only after Luthen had walked away.
Mama had spoken the truth. Luthen was killed in battle with the Gadfian sea pirates that plagued the waters about the Red Land only a few weeks later, and soon after Cassandra and Mama and Hannah and most of those that had come with them to the Red Land years before, had begun to prepare for the difficult sea voyage across the perilous Clouded Sea first to the Spit, where it was said that a wave of stone reared up from a seared black land, and thence to a distant part of that same land, where Mama said they would c
ome to the place where she had been made. Obernewtyn.
Hannah had thought often of her mother’s words to Luthen on the journey that followed. The thought of walking along a dark road with her grim, powerful mother thrilled her as much as it frightened her, and after they had been blown ashore on the Land she had waited eagerly for the day when her mother would tell her more of the journey they would make together. But she had never done so.
Hannah spoke of the dark road often enough, but only in mutters to herself, and those words had seemed part of a great and endless story her mother had been telling herself for as long as Hannah remembered. But it was Mama’s story and all Hannah got of it were overheard scraps.
‘Oh, don’t blame her, little one,’ Cassandra said, having drawn Hannah onto her knee after Mama sent her out. Cassandra had always made excuses for Mama’s distracted coldness, which had grown worse rather than better after they came to the Land. Cassandra, by sharp contrast, had always made time for Hannah. Even nursing Evander, or in the midst of the drawing or the sculpting and honing of stone that was her love and her passion, she had been willing to stop and stroke Hannah’s cheek as she explained that Mama’s moods rose from grieving over Hannah’s father whom she had left, never knowing they would not see one another again. Hundreds of years, maybe more, and the end of a world lay between their parting, and yet Mama grieved and grieved. Hannah had been too young to be able to say that she wished only to have a share in that grieving, even though her father had died long before she was born. Because sharing the grief would bring her closer to her mother.
‘She was not always like this,’ Cassandra said another time, laying aside a chisel to brush away a scatter of tears. Combing Hannah’s wild dark tangle of hair, she told a story in which Hannah’s jade-green eyes and dark hair were given to a princess in a thorny castle who had slept an enchanted sleep as she and Mama had done, when Hannah had lain in Mama’s belly. Once Hannah asked Cassandra why she was not hard and cold like Mama, since she too had lost a husband and served the future.
Cassandra’s answer had been very serious. ‘I serve the future, it is true, little one, but I do not see it as your mother does. It is she who must swim the currents of time to learn what I must do to prepare for the Seeker who will ensure that what was done will not be done again. Sometimes she has shown me glimpses of futures that froze the blood in my veins.’
Hannah had not liked it when her beloved Cassandra was so stern, and so she asked, ‘Tell me how it was when you met Mama.’
Cassandra had smiled at the familiar question; a curving display of the perfect white teeth that she shared with Mama but not with Hannah or Evander who had come to life in a world without the uncomfortable magician doctors Cassandra called dentists.
‘I wrote to your mother,’ Cassandra always began the story of her meeting with Hannah’s mother in this way. ‘I wrote to ask if there were truly powers of the mind, for it was my belief that I possessed them. I could speak to the minds of other people and animals and sometimes make them do as I wished. Your mother was a scientist known as having an interest in the paranormal, though in that time few believed in the existence of such things because they were rare. Your mother wrote back and invited me to meet her.’
‘You met in Newrome the first time,’ Hannah prompted, knowing this part of the story.
Cassandra nodded. ‘I had never been there and it was a marvel to me. Your mother was waiting for me at the Reception Centre of the Reichler Clinic, which studied paranormal phenomena, but little of any note was shown to me there and the tests I was given showed I had no particular ability. I would have been disappointed, save that your mother had used telepathy to tell me the place was a facade to fool the government warmongers interested in developing paranormal abilities as weapons. Very soon, she promised that she would take me to a true refuge for people with special abilities like mine and hers.’
‘Obernewtyn,’ Hannah said eagerly. ‘How I wish we could go there.’
That was where the telling usually ended, for the mountains were tainted by the poisons of the lost world and could not be crossed. The history had been told many times and both Hannah’s questions and Cassandra’s answers had the formality and familiar cadences of a response song. But one day Cassandra had answered that last rhetorical question. ‘Your Mama believes the mountain valley of Obernewtyn is not contaminated. She intends to go and see if she can find a way up.’
Hannah had not known what to say to that, for she did not want to leave Cassandra and little Evander nor the glazes and tools that had been allowed her. She thought of their departure from the Red Land after the special memorial chamber had been built for Luthen. Cassandra had carved his likeness on the wall because there was no body to put in a grave, since neither his body nor his sword had been recovered from the sea. Aquilla had refused to allow them to leave when it had first been mentioned, for Cassandra was carrying her brother’s son. But after Cassandra and Mama spoke at length to her in Luthen’s funeral chamber, she had gifted them with boats marked with her own sigil, and on the day they left, she summoned porpoises to guide them safe across the Clouded Sea. Hannah had not known how she could reach the minds of sea creatures, for her own ability to commune with beasts did not extend to anything that swam or lived in water.
The sea had been still and the currents steady and they had not once fallen foul of the multitude of shoals and hidden reefs for which the Clouded Sea was infamous. But the porpoises left after they reached the Spit, and Hannah sometimes had nightmares even years later of the storm-wracked nightmarish journey from the dreadful Spit along endless lifeless Black Coasts till they were washed up in a storm more dead than alive on the shore of the Land. Evander had been born very soon after that desperate landing, and Hannah had shivered and cringed hearing Cassandra’s screams of pain during the birthing.
‘I will have no children,’ she had told her mother.
Mama had looked at her, eyes suddenly flickering and milky in the fluttering lantern light. ‘You will have two daughters, Hannah, and they will have two daughters apiece and their daughters will have daughters and so on until a son is born in the time when the Seeker will come. When that son is grown, he will make Obernewtyn his own.’
Hannah had wanted to ask if that unborn boy far in the future would also have to walk the Black road, for she had always believed that it was the road that led to Obernewtyn. But before she could frame the question, there was a groan and a slap and the sound of a baby wailing in the night. Evander had cried all night long and for days following, for Cassandra was too thin after the loss of Luthen and the terrible hardships of the journey from the Red Land, and had no milk. It was Mama found a wet nurse for the wailing child and nursed Cassandra.
Sometimes as a woman grown, with Nell suckling contentedly at her breast, Hannah had wondered if those first hungry days were the key to the yearning that had made Evander such a wearisome, demanding boy. And if that was so, how much of her own nature had been shaped by her birth in the midst of the deadly ruins of a dead world, to a mother racked by sorrow and loss?
They had feared Cassandra would die after Evander was born, but Mama said it would not be so. She had been right, Cassandra’s fever had broken, and weak as a kitten she staggered over and scratched her son’s name on the stone face of the gargantuan Tor rising up from the edge of the land, which formed the back wall of the rough hut built to house her. Hannah got goosebumps when Evander told her, years later, that he would be buried under those carved words when he died.
She had been happy in those early days on Stonehill. They had all been, maybe because they had come so close to dying on the terrible journey to the Spit. After they got established, they began trading to the nearby settlement of Halfmoon Bay and it was not long before Cassandra’s work with black Tor stone, not to mention the work resulting from the skills and arts that had been taught to the others by the artisans of the Red Land, had made Stonehill famous. Soon the demand for Cassandra’s work was ne
arly equalled by requests to be taught. They had set up a modest school and before long they had a waiting list of students and a thriving community.
But most of that had happened after Mama left. They had not long lived upon Stonehill when Hannah had found her mother packing. Cassandra had told her Mama’s intentions only days before, and she had complained bitterly, saying she did not want to go.
‘You will not be going,’ Mama had answered without looking at her. ‘You will stay with Cassandra.’
Hannah had been aghast for, while she moaned at having to go, she had never imagined being left behind. ‘But I am to walk the Black road with you! You saw it! You said it!’ she had shouted.
