The Rebellion: The Obernewtyn Chronicles

WE ENTERED THE gate to the greenthorn maze that separated the main buildings of Obernewtyn from its farm and fields, walking somewhat awkwardly beside each other on the narrow track that ran between two thick-packed banks of snow. The nights were still painfully cold. I pulled my coat around me and sank my face into the collar.

Our progress was noisy, for the ground was covered in a crust of ice that cracked loudly when it was broken. For some way, we did not speak but only watched where we walked. It was very dark, and aside from the possibility of slipping, greenthorn stings were unpleasant.

Fresh snow fell like a dusting of flour on the black earth and on the evergreen foliage of the bushes flanking either side of us. The moon rose when we were halfway through the maze, and our shadows appeared on the path before us, deep blue and sharp edged. There was less need to watch our steps so intently, and Freya asked, “Do you miss Rushton?”

“He only just left, so it is less a matter of missing him than knowing I will miss him,” I said wryly. “Certainly I already miss him as Master of Obernewtyn.”

“I suppose it is no pleasure to have to stand in his stead,” Freya said.

“I would not like the responsibility.”

“I doubt Rushton likes the responsibility of being master here, if it comes to that.”

I glanced sideways at the empath-enhancer, and it struck me that something was troubling her. My instinct was not to pry, yet this rose out of my discomfort with emotions. I had always found them cursed awkward things, but these days I was trying to be as receptive as a nonempath could be. The fact that I had noticed Freya’s mood proved that at least I was honing my awareness somewhat. Nevertheless, I struggled a little with my own reticence before speaking. “Are you happy here?”

A fleeting smile bestowed on her plain features a quicksilver beauty. “If I could not be happy here, then I am incapable of it.”

“And yet?” I sounded abrupt rather than sympathetic and regretted my clumsiness.

Freya sighed and blinked snowflakes from her lashes. “When Avra asked me to speak about those days traveling with my father, it all came back to me.”

Freya’s father sold her because her gift for soothing horses—the very Talent by which he had made his livelihood—had caused the Council to mutter of the black arts.

“Many poisons rise at night and seep away by morning,” I said.

We came in mutual silence to the end of the maze path and parted in the cobbled area beyond its gate. The snow had stopped falling and was melting on the stones as I entered the Farseekers’ wing of Obernewtyn. Mounting the stairs to my turret room, I felt as if I would sleep for a year.

“I thought ye mun want to go through th’ agenda an’ add a few things after last night’s beastmerge,” he said. “I’ll pick th’ list up later.” I nodded sleepily, and he fussed about for a time with papers and the fire before opening the door to go. Maruman entered as he left, slinking across the room and leaping onto the window ledge.

I rose and splashed my face with icy water, then brought my tray to the ledge. Maruman refused any of my food, saying he had drunk his fill on the farms.

I ate, looking out upon the patch of garden clasped within the elbow of the rambling west wing of Obernewtyn. Over it, I could see a segment of the gray stone wall that surrounded our land, and past that, because the land sloped up, the mass of the forest that lay around us in the mountain valley. Most of the trees were still bare, and above them rose the high mountains—shoulder upon shoulder of them, still clad in their wintertime pelt and seeming almost to float in the sky.

They looked so pure and untouched, and yet the snow concealed the streaks of blackened earth left by the holocaust poisons, where still, centuries after, nothing could grow. In many places, the poisons were so virulent as to sear and blister the flesh at a touch, and more than the briefest exposure to them ensured a painful death. The world was full of such tainted places, some vast beyond imagining.

Maruman reached out a lazy paw and batted like a kitten at a strand of my hair caught up by the wind. I felt a rush of tenderness for him but resisted the urge to run my fingers over his soft belly fur, for he little liked to be petted as if he were a tame beast.

I ought to have mentioned Dameon’s request at the beastmerge, I thought, and sighed. So much time was spent in meetings and merges, and in hurrying to yet another meeting to speak of what had been decided at the one before.

I pulled my shawl tighter, enjoying the delicate pink-gold quality of the light. It contained the promise of the brief, sweet season of spring. Each year, I both desired and dreaded the end of wintertime and the thawing of the pass that was our only access to the rest of the Land, for though it meant the end of the bitter cold, it also meant we were again accessible to our enemies.

It was the fear that we might be found and attacked by the Council that had led us the previous year to seek an alliance with their sworn enemies, a Landwide network of rebels. They had largely rejected us as freaks and mutants, so we had tried to prove our worthiness as battle companions, only to demonstrate to the rebels and to ourselves that our Talents did not incline to aggression or violence.

This had been a revelation, and instead of lamenting our inability to be warriors, we had rejoiced, determined to henceforth concentrate our resources and abilities on seeking nonaggressive means of defending ourselves from the Council.

Domick had been changed terribly by his work as our spy within the Councilcourt, for in this role, he had been forced to witness and accept torture and other horrors. He had become strange and remote and had severed himself from his bondmate, the Healer ward Kella. Just before the wintertime, we had received a letter in which he formally withdrew from the Coercer guild and from Obernewtyn, saying he could not accept our new oath of nonviolence. “It would be like a lamb declaring to a pack of savage wolves that he was a pacifist. What do the wolves care!”

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.

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.

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 oldOnes 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.

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