by Jack
‘I must go,’ her mother had answered harshly, brown eyes dry, brown hair streaked with grey. A brief hard embrace and then a push away and Mama went out. She spoke a moment to Cassandra, giving her the letter, Hannah realised years later. Another hug and then Mama went off along the road leading to the switchback trail the men were making so that bullocks and horses could go laden up and down Stonehill. She had not looked back, and Hannah had stood at the edge of the Tor, tears drying on her cheeks as she watched until her mother appeared doll-sized far below and set off in the direction of the main road that would bring her to the Suggredoon River ferry.
There had been letters from time to time over the years. She had got work in a village. The pass to the high mountains was badly contaminated with radiation but she was looking for another way up to Obernewtyn. In another letter, she spoke of a vegetable garden, and added that she was trying to find a way into Newrome, where a contamination suit might be found that would let her walk safely through the pass. Hannah had stood stonily while Cassandra read the letters out, glancing sympathetically at her. She only cared that her mother never asked for her to come.
Once, Cassandra drew her close and said it was hard, with mothers. She had spent her life hating her own mother, only to regret that she had not found some way to reach her, ere the end. ‘Don’t waste time hating, love,’ Cassandra whispered.
Hannah stayed with Cassandra for the rest of her childhood and into womanhood. She potted and glazed and tended house and pumped water and dug vegetables and helped care for Evander until he was old enough to be a playmate and then a companion. All the while Cassandra’s fame as a sculptress grew. They now called the Tor stone Cassandra-stone, because its gleaming darkness resembled her skin, and her students all but worshipped her. Councilmen came from afar to beg her to make a piece for them. So much was created that gradually a stone garden was built, filled with Cassandra’s work and the work of her students. She carved Evander and Hannah several times over the years at different ages.
The last carving Cassandra had done was of her long dead husband, Luthen. That had been the centrepiece of the great bribe to be paid to the increasingly powerful Councilmen, whose soldierguards now patrolled the roads and demanded to know who and where and what of every traveller.
‘It will get worse,’ Cassandra had told Evander. ‘Hannah’s mother warned me of it years ago. Soon permits will be required for anyone wanting to travel. But this bribe will ensure that we are allowed to move about the Land freely.’
‘But why offer a yearly tithe as well as the bribe?’ Evander had protested. ‘You have offered them king’s ransom in goods and coin as well as that statue of Father.’
‘It is not for them but for us that I offer a tithe,’ Cassandra told him. ‘It will be a reminder and a desirable reinforcement of the bargain I have made. Whenever the councilmen contemplate setting the safe passage agreement aside, and they will, greed for what is to come that year will stay them. That is why they must be offered the best and most lavish of our work.’
‘That is why you ceased taking students outside the Twentyfamilies,’ Evander had said.
His mother had nodded. ‘The time of students and teaching is over. The things we offer in tithe must be able to be obtained only in this way — by the faithful keeping of the bargain I have wrought.’
All this Evander had told her on one of his visits to Mellow Farm after his mother vanished, and Hannah had listened with only half an ear, remembering that it was the night Cassandra finished the carving of her that Evander kissed her. She’d had an inkling of how he felt about her before that, but she had refused to think of it seriously. He was only seventeen and her brother. She fought him but only after she got over her shock at being kissed so thoroughly.
‘I am not your brother,’ he had said defiantly, when she got free. ‘There is no blood tie between us. We could wed.’
‘I don’t think of you like that!’ she had told him truthfully.
‘You let me kiss you for long enough if you didn’t like it,’ he said slyly.
She had felt herself blush, but she said as evenly and gently as she could, ‘Vander, I love you but not that way. You are my brother and you are only a boy. When you grow up you will see it properly.’ She had tried to be kind, and maybe that had angered him most of all.
In answer he had grabbed at her and kissed her again, pressing his body the whole length of hers so she must know that he was no child. She had spent her childhood protecting him and coddling him and it was her instinct, even now, to protect him. But feeling him against her like that shocked her, and she pushed him harder than she meant to. He overbalanced and hit his temple when he fell. There was a trickle of blood and when she reached down to him, as he got to his feet, he struck her across the face and told her in a voice that shook with rage and humiliation that he would be the king of Stonehill and the Twentyfamilies when his mother was gone, and that she might have been his queen, but since she had spurned him then she must leave.
His harsh words hurt her as they were meant to do, and yet Hannah would have stayed, knowing the words spoken and the blow came out of pain. But Cassandra had come to her with a cloth for her bruised cheek after he stormed out.
‘My darling girl, it hurts me to say it, but he is right in one thing. It is time for you to leave Stonehill. Evander is young and frightened of the burden of leadership that I must lay upon him much sooner than he knows. You think his feelings for you are those of a child, but they are not. He loves you, but I know that you do not love him. And that is well, for your future is not with the Twentyfamilies gypsies.’
‘You will leave?’ Hannah’s eyes filled up with tears.
‘Your mother foresaw it, and I told Vander of her vision just a few nights past. Now I will tell you this much of it. A Gadfian pirate ship like the one that took Luthen will come to this shore and I must let myself be taken by it, for the next place the pirates go is a Beforetime place where I must go to obtain something the Seeker will need.’
‘The Seeker,’ Hannah had echoed bitterly, almost hating the shadowy woman in the future who had stolen her mother from her and now Cassandra as well.
‘Listen to me, Hannah. I send you away now because this quarrel with Evander will make your parting easier for him to bear. You see, your mother bade me send you to the mountains before I am taken. I do not know exactly when the pirates will come. It may be days or weeks, but not more. I have a letter Hannah gave me to give you when this moment came.’ She drew the letter from her apron pocket and kissed Hannah, then left her to read it.
My daughter, it began. My Hannah. I have not been a good mother to you. So much of me was swallowed up always by visions of the future. Terrible visions that I scarcely understood, and which commanded things of me that seemed impossible. I refused your father to begin with, because of the long and difficult duty my dreams and visions laid upon me. But when he asked again I loved him and could not hide it. Once he saw that, he would not accept no for an answer. ‘The end of the world is coming, my love,’ he said. ‘You have seen it and I believe in your visions. I am not as you and the others are. There is no special thing about me save my wealth and that is already yours.’ How wrong he was. I have never known a man more fair and kind and steady hearted. I wish you could have known him, Hannah. I called you by my own name because he said if we had a daughter I must give him that one thing. It hurts me and has always hurt me that he never knew about you. But I did not know I was pregnant when I left him that last time. I ought to have done, but I had felt myself too old for children. And for all the visions that had come to me, not one had shown me your face.
Always it seems to me, I have failed to see the things that mattered most to me personally. When I left my own Antipoda so very long ago, I knew my destiny was in Uropa, for my visions showed it to me. I thought to find those like me, never knowing it would be me who would form the secret place to which others with paranormal abilities would come, never knowing that I would see the end of o
ne world and the birth of another. In those early days William Reichler was my hero, and I thought not of love. I did not see Jacob in any vision. I did not know him when I met him and thought only to win him as a patron. I had no idea that he would come to be so dear to me. Never once did any vision show me that I was coming to love him as a man. Nor later, when I lay with him, did I see that we would have a daughter. Both of you came to me in that blind spot in my vision and more than all else, it has confirmed for me that my visions are not to serve my own dreams or to enhance my life or the lives of those I love. They are given me to serve the world, and so I have done as faithfully as I could.
Yet do not doubt that I have loved you. I knew of your existence only at the end of that age before this one. It was a machine that told me, before it cast me into a sleep that would trick time. The machine did not know what coldsleep would do to a fetus, but we had no choice. I had to submit to that long sleep, never knowing if I would wake or if you would survive. I had foreseen only that Cassy would live and it was she who mattered because she was to prepare the way for the Seeker. Then I woke and you lived and you grew in me even as we sailed across the devastated world seeking the place where my visions showed me life had survived. To feel you inside me was a joy and yet a terror too, for I did not know would come of a baby who had slept lifetimes in the womb. But born you were amidst the ruins of the past, and perfect you were to my eyes. How I loved your serious, gentle nature that was so like your father’s and how it pleased me that you should be able to speak to beasts as I could. How hard it was to hold back from you so that I could do what I must.
I hurt you when I left you, I know, but less than I hurt myself. And now, if you are reading this, the time has come for you to follow me. Come up to the high mountains. There is a village where there is a rumour of Guanette birds. That was my destination when I left Stonehill. Come thus far, and find the future I have foreseen for you. It is my gift to you. Read no more of this letter until your first daughter bears a child and that child is ten. Trust me that it will be better thus.’
She had stopped reading, obedient as ever. Her face and bodice had been wet with tears shed out of a painful joy at knowing that her mother had loved her, had thought of her, had sorrowed at their parting. That letter healed a bitterness that might have twisted her, and she went to Cassandra and showed her the letter and they wept together, then she went and packed her things and left, regretting that she could not say goodbye to Evander, but eager for news of her mother. The argument with Evander seemed to have happened years before and it startled her when she touched her cheek that she could feel the bruise where he had struck her.
* * * *
‘I was not too old for an adventure back then, but I am too old for it now,’ Hannah said, trying to grumble, but the foreboding and sorrow she had felt leaving Mellow Farm a week before had sloughed away. Birds were singing and the sun was shining and when a breeze blew, the air was sweet and white with blossom. She went up on the made road as far as the turnoff to Darthnor mine and saw few folk on the way, and no one at all on the overgrown track that ran on towards the mountains from there, passing as it did between the firestorm ravaged wilderness of the White Valley on the one side and a dark, dense pine forest frequented by bears and worse on the other. Now she was following a track that brought her in the afternoon to the steep pass that ran aslant through the high mountains. The sky was clear but queer storms roiled in the pass that never stopped or went anywhere else. Hannah had heard talk of them but they were unsettling to see and she could not imagine what caused them. The static in the air made all of her hair stand on end.
Her mother had said in the letter that a person could not go safely on foot through the pass without a contamination suit but by the time she came there a horse going at a gallop might manage it and keep itself and a rider safe. Hannah had camped the night then sent out a call. A shaggy mare answered it, a frayed tether rope about her neck. Her bones stood out and the marks and scars upon her coat wiped away any guilt Hannah might have felt at calling her, though she was not sure the poor thing would have the strength to carry them both through the eerie pass at a flat gallop.
However, she must trust the beast, whose name was Willing. In those days in the land, there was a fashion for the naming of children and beasts after virtues, hoping the former would beget the latter. Sometimes it was so. In Willing’s case it was, for despite her poor condition, they flew through the terrifying pass at a gallop. The mare had been panting like a bellows, wild-eyed when they passed out of the queer storms and into clear air, but she soon calmed, for the valley they found on the other side of it was very fair and green and quiet. Hannah had climbed down from Willing and they went side by side up the remains of an ancient road, until they came at last to the ruins that had been fabled Obernewtyn, where her mother and father had once lived and worked. The walls that once surrounded the grounds had all fallen as if a giant hand had thumped the ground, but the walls of the building were mostly intact. The roofs had long rotted away though, and the inside was all grown over with moss and creepers, but the maze her mother had talked of planting with her father thrived, though it was so knitted together with weeds and brambles that it would have been impossible to go through it.
Willing grazed contentedly on the rich sweet grass and moss, nourishing herself and the foal she had told Hannah she carried. Hannah picked over the stones, searching for some chord in herself that would resonate with this place where she had been conceived. But it was just a stony ruin, beautiful and desolate in the way ruins always are when left to nature. After a time, Hannah found the little hut built up out of fallen stone, resting against a bit of the wall that had once surrounded the maze. There had been a vegetable garden planted beside it, she guessed, though there was no sign of it now. She did not need to go inside it to know this was where her father had lived out the long lonely years of his life before he left Obernewtyn to walk the dark road.
She found her mother’s bones laid out by a crumbling stone bench overgrown by a wild rose bush with scarlet blooms and ferocious thorns.
Do not fear my bones, her mother had written. I will lay me by the bench your father made so we could sit and talk at the end of a day, and smell the roses he planted for me ... What is left of my flesh will nourish the soil and the beasts and birds and insects that kindly pick them clean. Not far from the bench is a crypt with Jacob’s name upon it. Do not trouble yourself over it for he is not inside it. The grave was built before I came to understand all of the visions I had seen, and it serves a purpose that is no concern of yours or mine. Take up my bones in a sack and carry it to the highest mountains above this valley. Pass the horned mountain and travel North until you find the ruins of an ancient tower. There will be an old road going down from it to the black and blasted lands. Go down to it and walk directly towards the setting sun. Wear the contamination suit which I have foreseen myself finding and which I will leave for you in the hut Jacob built, along with packages of food and water and eliminatory bags I will find in the laboratories as well. There will be instructions on how to use them with the suit. They are none of them comfortable or pleasant to use, as you may remember, but used correctly, they will ensure that you need not take off the suit. Do not remove it until you reach the white plain and the Black road that runs across it.
We will walk that road together even as I foretold, though I did not warn you that I would be dead. You were too young for such a grim truth. The Black road, followed to its end, will bring us to a city and your father’s true grave. One warning. Keep to the road once you have set your feet upon it, for I have seen that if you lose it, you will never find it again. Do not read past this page until you see the city, then stop and read the rest of my letter. It will tell what must be done to bring me to your father’s grave.
This difficult and lonely duty I give you now is not to serve me or your father but for the world that we humans have so battered and diminished. What you do will ensure that what wa
s done can never be done again. If you fail to lay me with your father, all that Cassandra and I have done, all that your father did, will be to no avail. The Seeker will fail too, and the world will come to a final dreadful ending.
But I do not think you will fail the tests ahead.
I use the remainder of this page to tell you that I love you, my daughter. My only regret is that I did not say it often enough to you. And yet if I had done so, if I had let myself feel that love or looked too much at you, I would not have been able to leave you. Never in my life was anything so hard to do as to do so knowing I would never see you in this life again. I might have kept you with me all the years between my leaving and my death here at Obernewtyn, but I wished for you to have the life I foresaw for you, with love and children of your own; Not only because, in time, your descendants will claim Obernewtyn and rebuild it, but because you deserved it. That would not have come to you, if I had kept you with me.
* * * *
Hannah stumbled slightly over a crack in the Black road, and blinked away a mist of tears that had come up at the memory of those words cramped together to fit into the end of the page, and at the thought of her mother living out her life with only bees for company, all so that her daughter could have a husband and children. It hurt and salved Hannah at the same time that all of her mother’s hard choices had not been for the future of the world and the Seeker to come.
