The Sending

by Isobelle Carmody

  The younger Iriny began to pull away the creeper festooning the statue and then she knelt and pushed aside the tangle of grass growing about its feet. I supposed she must be tending the statue and wondered why she did not simply pull out the grass and leave a space about the base of it. Then I realised she was not clearing the greenery, but burrowing into it.

  My heart began to hammer with anticipation as her purposefulness made it clear that she was looking for something. Was it possible that I was not to find the statue itself but some object, buried before it by the Twentyfamilies in accord with some instruction left by Cassy? I did not see how it could be Cassandra’s key taken from Obernewtyn by Jacob Obernewtyn, unless the gypsies had long ago found it in the mountain valley above Obernewtyn. It was at least theoretically possible, for it was gypsies who had ridden up to offer to Marisa Seraphim the panels that had contained the messages Cassy had hidden in them for me, and they might have been sent up also to find and retrieve Cassandra’s key.

  I knelt beside the young Iriny, the better to see what she was doing, and discovered that the statue was not crouching on the bare earth as I had thought but upon a wide plinth of the same white stone. Either the base of the statue had been deliberately buried, or it had sunk into the earth under its own weight. Iriny dug and scraped to expose the plinth, and I itched to help her to hasten the work but at last she gave a grunt of triumph.

  I leaned over her shoulder to see that she had exposed two lines of scribing cut into the base. The first read: when one door is closed another may open and under it was scribed, Luthen’s code is Luthen’s heart.

  Even as I read the words, committing them to memory, the younger Iriny stood up and gazed, rapt, into the face of the statue. I stifled an impulse to ask her older counterpart if Luthen had been the name of Evander’s father. One look at her set face told me that she had no intention of speaking about what we were seeing. We both watched as her younger self stooped to push the earth back into place and fluff up the draggle of weeds, then she draped the creeper back over the shoulder and arm of the statue.

  Why had she bothered to uncover the words, I wondered? Had she been instructed to make sure they were still readable, or had she wanted to see them for herself, since, according to her, this was the first time she had set eyes on the statue? I stepped past her to look more closely at the sculpture. It was not the face that I studied now, but the clothes and ornaments, which were unusual looking, with many delicately carved amulets about the neck, wrists and ankles. While I was almost certain the words on the base of the statue were Cassy’s message to me, I did not mean to make the mistake of missing something vital by leaping to an obvious conclusion. After all, this was the only chance I would have to study the statue.

  I walked all around it, examining it closely. The man carried a pack of some description over his shoulder, not unlike the one I had just given to Jil, and it made him look as if he were about to make a journey; a fitting pose to commemorate the beginning of a nomadic life, I thought.

  It was not until I had circled the statue several times that I noticed a shallow intricate pattern snaking up one strongly muscled arm. I wondered if this had been Cassandra’s way of representing a tattoo. Twentyfamilies gypsies used the grisly technique of pressing tiny, sharp, ink-laden spikes into the skin to mark out an indelible design. I knew this intimately because Swallow had broken Twentyfamily lore by giving me – an outsider – the same tattoo all purebloods wore. It had been a painful process and ultimately pointless, for my body had regarded it as a wound and healed it with the dumb and uncontrollable power gifted it by the Agyllian birds. The tattoo upon Luthen’s arm, if it was a tattoo – if it was Luthen – was not the tattoo given me of three flamebirds flying in a spiral, but it was the tattoo of a bird and it seemed to me that I had seen it before, though I could not think where.

  Studying it, I could not decide if the bird was an Agyllian, but the longer I stared at the statue the more sure I was that it was the brother of the Red Queen. His clothes were the same scanty attire as folk wore in my dreams of the hot Red Land, and it was possible that the Twentyfamilies tradition of tattooing had originated in the Red Queen’s land. Perhaps those who intended to follow Cassy across the sea to the Land had been tattooed before leaving, as a way of marking their allegiance to her and her quest to prepare the way for the Seeker. I could imagine she would have relished using the three bird design in this way, after it had been used by a man she had despised to obscure shameful activities.

  I turned my attention to the letters and numbers on the amulets, knowing I could revisit my own memory of the statue if there was a need for it. Some bore markings too indistinct to make out and I wondered if that was how Cassy had carved them or whether Iriny had not looked at them well enough to imprint them on her memory. Or maybe the statue had weathered over time.

  The statue began to lose definition and I turned to see that the younger Iriny was departing.

  ‘The memory is ending,’ warned the older Iriny.

  I had one final glimpse of the statue fading like mist in sunlight in a ghostly clearing then I withdrew from Iriny’s memory and mind. Coming back to consciousness of my own body sitting slumped on the porch, I realised that my feet and hands were numb with cold, for we had been sitting in shadow.

  ‘Better … go inside,’ I said through chattering teeth, and levered myself up. I could tell from the jerky way Iriny rose that she was no less frozen, and we went gladly into the warm watchhut.

  11

  ‘I was just about to come and get you both,’ Jil said cheerfully. ‘You’d best go over to the fire and warm up. We don’t usually bother keeping it alight after firstmeal, but I have stoked it up for you and there is plenty of wood in the box.’

  I was too cold to answer so I merely nodded, dragging off my coat and gloves and kicking my boots onto the hearth before I dropped onto a stool before the fire. I stretched out my hands to it, grimacing at the painful tingling in them. Only then did I become aware of the delicious smells filling the shack. The sight and scents of food made me feel ravenous and I realised I had eaten only one small pie and a couple of sweet rolls the previous night, instead of a proper meal.

  Jil urged us to eat and I forced myself to get up and go to the table. There were savoury pan breads as well as the steaming pot of porridge, pancakes drizzled with honey and a platter of nuts and dried berries. I filled my plate, as did Iriny, but Jil shook her head when I asked if she was not eating, saying that she had finished her own firstmeal, for it was her turn at the watch. We were just starting on our food before the fire when Alden appeared. A heavy-set older coercer with a slow highland accent and sun-browned skin near dark as Iriny’s, he greeted us absently as he peeled off two coats, unwound a warm muffler and removed his woollen cap and gloves.

  He got some food and brought it to a big chair by the fire, glancing at Iriny. Deciding that I ought to explain our meeting in some innocuous way, I introduced them and then straight away asked if Iriny’s people had any tales or stories about the Red Land. Only as I spoke did it strike me that since Iriny’s people had travelled from the Red Land to our shores they might well have kept some record of that journey. But Iriny shrugged and said, ‘Any memories or maps of that journey are in the keeping of the D’rekta to the Twentyfamilies.’

  Something Iriny had said outside came back to me then, and when Alden got up to fetch a second helping of food, I asked her quietly, ‘You said that Swallow sent you ahead. Is he to come up to the mountains as well?’

  She nodded. ‘Our elders have asked him to seek a vision so that he can name an heir, and our people have always come to the White Valley for such things.’

  That startled me. ‘But surely Swallow is not too old to father a child,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps he is unable to father a child, for most gypsy men have already done so by my brother’s age, even if they have not bonded. I think the elders fear it, in any case, and so they asked our seers to look into Swallow�
�s future. They were told that no heir of my brother’s loins will ever become D’rekta.’ Iriny gave me a sombre look and I thought suddenly of Swallow’s certainty that he would be with me on the final stage of my quest.

  Very soon after we first met, he had spoken of a dream he had experienced in which he had seen himself standing with me in the place where the ancient promises had first been made. The formulation of the ancient promises had almost certainly happened in the Red Land before Cassy had sailed to the Land with those who were to become the Twentyfamilies. Was it possible that the Twentyfamily seers had foreseen not that Swallow was unable to father a child, but that he would travel with me to the Red Land to play a part long before assigned to him in my quest, and for this reason he would produce no heir to rule his people? Certainly something had changed, because not long ago the elders had refused to allow him to cross the Suggredoon during the battle over the west coast because he had not yet an heir and might not be risked. That was why he had sent Iriny in his place.

  ‘I need to speak with your brother, Iriny,’ I said, as Alden resumed his seat. ‘Will you ask him to ride up to Obernewtyn to meet me as soon as he comes to the White Valley.’

  She frowned. ‘The choosing of a heartson or daughter is no small thing for any gypsy, much less a D’rekta, whose child must someday rule us. I will tell him your request after he has made his spirit journey.’

  ‘Then I pray his spirit journey will be short and fruitful.’

  She did not smile. ‘My brother will be fasting in order to purify himself before he seeks his vision but none can say how long a spirit journey will take. And once it is done, he will announce the name to the elders, after which the child must be fetched and anointed by him as his heartson before being returned to its blood parents. If the child is among those who travel with Swallow, this will not take long, but it may be that the infant will belong to a troupe that is elsewhere in the Land, and will have to be found and brought to the White Valley.’

  ‘How will yer brother go about seeking a vision?’ Alden asked curiously.

  Iriny gave him a stern, cold look. ‘That is not a matter to be spoken of to those who are not of the Twentyfamilies.’ She rose abruptly. ‘I must go back to the White Valley now. Fare you well, Elspeth Gordie.’ She nodded coolly to Alden and then, without further ado, she pulled on the coat and boots she had shed by the door and strode out.

  ‘I offended her,’ the coercer said, looking chastened.

  I shook my head absently. ‘Do not trouble yourself, Alden. It is only that she has little patience for courtesies.’

  ‘Strange eyes, but a strikin’ woman,’ Alden murmured with a sigh. ‘Is it true that gypsies can tell if they are lied to?’

  ‘They can see it in the person’s aura, which is what they call the spirit when it is seen with the waking eyes, though I believe only some gypsies have that Talent,’ I answered.

  ‘I wonder why they have different Talents from other Misfits,’ Alden said, but I hardly heard him for I was thinking that there had been something final in the way Iriny had bade me farewell. She had spoken, I thought, as if she knew that we would not meet again.

  When I emerged from the watchhut, it was late morning and the sky had clouded over, though there were still patches of blue.

  Gahltha came to join me, explaining that, after speaking for some time with the mare Vinderlin, who had carried the gypsy up from the White Valley, Avra had decided to accompany her and Iriny so that she could speak with the horses that moved about with the gypsies. She wanted to find out how they viewed their relationship with the funaga.

  ‘It sounds as if she is gathering information,’ I sent, wishing I had taken the time to speak to her on the ride down. On the other hand, Gahltha had once scolded me for the very human mistake, according to him, of believing that conversation was the only way in which beings could communicate.

  ‘Avra has been asked by the herd leader to learn more of the ways in which equines serve / subjugate themselves to the funaga,’ Gahltha sent.

  That startled me enough to get my whole attention, but it should not have surprised me, for the horses of the Land had always been inclined to activism. ‘Did you wish to go with her?’ I asked.

  ‘I would not have been wanted,’ the stallion said solemnly. ‘I have too much funaga about me for Avra these days.’

  His words saddened me for his sake, but he did not seem much downcast by the departure of the mare, and I reminded myself yet again that horses saw relationships differently from humans.

  Ducking to avoid a low, hanging branch, I thought about the statue I had seen in Iriny’s memory. I had not asked if it had been inspired by Cassy’s Red Land bondmate, but I felt sure I was right, if only because of the resemblance of its subject to statues of Evander Cassy had chiselled. I would have liked to know how the statue had ended up in relative obscurity in a patch of forest on Noviny’s property in Saithwold when it had originally been presented to the Councilmen of the day by Evander, as D’rekta of the Twentyfamilies, on the west coast.

  I conjured the clue in my mind that referred to the safe-passage memorial: That which will reach the [heart/centre/core] of the [sentinel/guard/watcher] seals a [pact/promise/vow] which I did forge but never witnessed/saw.

  Then I pictured the words cut into the base of the statue:

  when one door is closed another may open

  Luthen’s code is Luthen’s heart.

  The fact that both Cassy’s clue and the words on the statue included the word heart suggested to me that they concerned the part of Sentinel that allowed it to operate and function, since a computermachine had no true heart. Of course, the repetition of the word might only be a coincidence arising from Fian’s attempt to find a word that would properly and exactly translate the meaning of the Gadfian script in the clue. But if I was right, the carved words might be a code that would enable me to ensure that Sentinel would never wake. Though it was only a machine I was thinking about, it gave me a queer feeling to realise that, in a sense, I was talking about killing Sentinel as it slept.

  I had just reached the road when the sound of wagon wheels and clopping hoofs penetrated the bubbling stew of my thoughts. I looked up to see one of the Teknoguild wagons coming round a bend towards me, drawn by the enormous obliging mare Lo.

  Garth and Fian were seated on the front bench swathed in cloaks, the younger man resting his hand on the brake lever, for the road down to the pass was steep and if a horse had to stop, the wagoner must prevent his wagon from careering into her. As they drew closer, I saw that there were other teknoguilders in the back of the wagon sitting along the benches, all wrapped in heavy cloaks.

  When Garth caught sight of me standing on the other side of the stream by the road, he hailed me in his booming voice as if he had come specifically to seek me out. Fian pulled on the brake as Lo came to a halt and I greeted the mare in beastspeech then turned my attention to the Teknoguildmaster.

  Before I could ask why on earth he was headed down the road when the moon fair was so close, Garth turned to the teknoguilders and said unceremoniously, ‘Get down all of you and walk along the road a ways so that I can speak with Guildmistress Gordie in private. You can warm yourselves and stretch your legs.’

  They obeyed, uncomplaining, jumping over the narrowest part of the stream and striding away down the road. Fian got down too, giving me a grin before he went to the edge of the stream where Lo was drinking and knelt to cup up some water to his own mouth.

  ‘It was them or me, and they are thinner and younger,’ Garth said, patting his prodigious belly. ‘Come up for a moment.’

  Curious, I dismounted and did as he said.

  ‘I was hoping to see you on the road for I wanted to speak to you about Analivia,’ Garth said. ‘I am concerned about her. She has not been into the valley for some days and when last I spoke to her, she talked about needing to discover what her curst father and brother are up to. I told her she was a fool if she did not leave them
to Dardelan’s warriors, but she said she needed to be sure that Bergold would be safe, for she would not always be here to protect him. I advised her to think about convincing him to move to Obernewtyn if she was really worried.’

  ‘I believe she spoke of it to him, but I fear he would not want to leave his orchards,’ I said.

  ‘Of course not, but I pointed out that he might agree to winter in the mountains, especially if she was to explain that he would be safe from their father and brother. She said there was no use in putting it that way, for while he knew about Moss and Radost getting away from the Councilfarm, he could not take in the possibility that his own father and brother would want revenge on them. He is not a fool, she says, but there are some things his mind will not hold – revenge for one, or hatred or viciousness.’

  I said, ‘Bergold lacks the imagination to conceive of evil, for no evil is in him.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but in any case, I told Ana that she ought not to be so fearful of her father and brother, for as renegades they were likely to be more concerned about such necessities of life as food and shelter than plotting revenge. She said I didn’t know her da if that was what I thought, that revenge and suchlike were more necessary to him and Moss than food and shelter,’ Garth added in a disgruntled voice.

  ‘What do you think she will do?’ I asked.

  ‘I am afraid she intends to discover where they are and deal with her brother and father herself.’

  ‘Deal with them – how?’ I demanded.

  He slanted me a glance. ‘I asked if she would alert the armsmen to their whereabouts if she learned it, but she said only that no Councilfarm or prison could long hold such men.’

  ‘I do not like the sound of that. Did she give you any idea where she thought they might be?’

  He shook his head. ‘But she did talk about the rumour of robber gangs targeting Misfits and of the possibility of Jude being involved.’