Isobelle Carmody is an award-winning speculative fiction author, with many books and short stories to her credit She won a Golden Aurealis for Best Overall Novel for her book Alyzon Whitestar and an Aurealis award for Best Short Story for ‘Green Monkey Dreams’ from the short story collection of the same name. She received a White Raven and an Aurealis award for her book Greylands. She won the peace price and was joint winner of the CBC children’s book of the year for older readers for The Gathering and she was shortlisted for both Obernewtyn and The Farseekers in her Obernewtyn series. She won the NSW Premiers prize for Angel Fever, a talking book of the year award for Scatterlings and an industry design award for Little Fur and A Fox called Sorrow, both of which she illustrated. She is currently working on the last book in the Obernewtyn series, The Sending. She lives with her daughter Adelaide and her partner Jan, who is a Jazz musician and poet, between their homes in Prague in Eastern Europe and on the Great Ocean Road in Australia.
* * * *
Hannah had walked so many days that it felt as if all else had been a dream, and yet she saw no end. The road stretched before her, dark as had been foretold, though not in any way she had imagined, and all around it sand flowed away to the horizon in every direction. Sometimes it covered the road in a pale grainy tide, or mounded up over it in great mute stubborn dunes, so that keeping to it was not always simple. She must sweep the sand off it with a rough broom she had made up for that purpose out of her store of foraged wood, or burrow through sand hills, for while the road went straight for days at a time, it had three times turned inexplicably as if whoever made it had suddenly changed their mind about where it ought to go. Hard to imagine the mind that had commanded the making of such an indelible thing, being uncertain of its destination.
But the road was the product of a world dead and gone. The desert might not even have existed when it was made and the rare sudden turns might once have served some purpose that time had erased. There was a chilly thought, for it might easily be that the road would come to nothing. Certainly nothing seemed more likely than something, let alone a city.
Yet what else was she to do but go on? She had run out of water a day past, and food three days before that. If she turned back, she would not survive the journey without food or water. Nor would she survive much longer going forward without them.
As well as being hungry and thirsty, she was very weary and one of her knees had begun to ache in an ominous way. That was old age for you. Things wore out. She would have liked to stop, but dusk was the goal she had set herself and it was only middling afternoon.
You can always go on longer than you think you can.
That had been one of Mellow’s sayings and it came to her now in his slow, soft voice. It was the first thing he’d said to her. She’d thought herself footsore back then when they had met on another road, long ago, though in truth she had been more heartsore than anything else. She had felt herself to be old then and to have walked far, though she had only been twenty-four and walked a mere sevenday or so and some of the time she had ridden in carts.
Mellow had come behind her, herding some goats up the road; coddling them along before him with soft taps of his stick. He had walked so quietly that when the goats had surged soft and warm and musky around Hannah, just as she slowed to a weary stop, she had thought them wild. ‘Hello goats, I think I have to stop,’ she said, made a bit stupid from the hot sun and the long walk.
‘A body can always go on a bit further than they think,’ their master had told her kindly as he stepped around her. ‘You might stop here, only there is a place up ahead where there is a stream. I’ll water the goats and then make a fire and tea there. You’re welcome to join us.’
She was too weary to be haughty, and besides she felt foolish having been caught talking to his goats. The young herder did not press her to accept his offer, which would have put her back up and made her wary. He just nodded and went on in his slow quiet way, walking heavy and gentle at the same time like one of those greathorses they bred in Murmroth.
She’d had no intention of stopping. She was still angry-hearted at the way Evander had ordered her away, and sorrowful at the things his mother had said to her, for they had been too much of duty and the future as her mother’s words had always been. But most of all she was aching because of her mother’s letter burning a hole in her pocket. Too many contrary things to feel, to leave room for fending off the amorous advances of a stranger.
Almost an hour on, she found Mellow sitting over a nice little fire between the road and a stream. The smell of tea and bread toasting floated to the road and crooked an inviting finger at her. Stomach rumbling, she went over the damp tufty grass. He told her his name and asked hers, then matter of factly he asked if she’d a mug of her own or would share his. So she got out her blue mug. He took it from her hand.
‘It’s a pretty thing,’ he murmured, admiring the glaze pattern with his fingers before filling the mug with tea. She blushed with pleasure, for while she’d never mastered the sculptor’s hammer or chisel, nor been over much of a potter, her glazes and designwork had been a matter of pride.
Later, he told her he’d guessed it was her work by the way she held it. He said little and saw a lot, Mellow. He was the utter opposite of handsome, dark-haired, copper-skinned Evander with his unexpected two-coloured eyes and gloomy, complex moods. Mellow had soft brown floppy hair, shy, watchful, smiling eyes and a quiet gentleness that had won her friendship. But it was his kindness that won her heart, all the more because it did not stop at humans. He was kind to beasts in general, though he had a special fondness for goats, which many farmers sneered at keeping, calling them wayward and difficult.
After the tea and a bit of inconsequential talk, they’d put out the fire and gone on walking slowly up the road together. Mellow said very little, but his company was soothing and later that night when he stopped to make camp, she accepted his invitation to stop as well, for he was right when he spoke of the dangers of the road to lone travellers. Nevertheless she had stayed sitting up stiffly by the fire, saying she would not sleep. Mellow did not try to reassure her, but only said goodnight and wrapped himself peacefully in his blanket, telling her there was no need to set a watch as the goats would let him know if any thing came near, human or beast. He closed his eyes and soon snored softly. She watched his eyelids twitching after a while, and wondered what he dreamed.
Near morning, she called herself a fool and lay down and slept too, though not deeply and not well. When he woke her, they ate some porridge she made and went naturally on together. Three days later they reached the turnoff to Arandelft. Mellow said he must go that way and asked if she would want to come with him. He was visiting his brother’s farm to drop two of the goats. He’d stay a night and be up to Guanette village just beyond the mountains by the next night. His own place was between Guanette and the Darthnor mine. In those days there was no Darthnor village and the miners camped out or went home to lodgings in Guanette.
But Hannah’s mother had written of Guanette village and of the strange birds for which the village was named, and hearing it was just beyond the range of mountains ahead, she was eager to get there and so refused his offer. They’d taken a friendly leave of one another and she had gone on alone, finding to her surprise that she missed the farmer’s unassuming companionship.
A few weeks later, she’d seen him in Guanette. She had taken work at an orchard, fruit picking, and had come to town with some of the other women to the Moon Fair. His face had lit up at the sight of her but there was no surprise in his expression. This told her that he had known she was there, which meant he had asked after her. The realisation made her blush but it was dark and he only asked if she had heard any news of her mother.
‘She lived here for a while,’ Hannah told him, grief making her curt, for she had truly thought to find her mother here. ‘She was the beekeeper at Tarry’s farm.’
‘The old woman they called the moonwatcher,’ Mellow said, eyes widening a little. ‘I saw her a few times when I was a boy and roaming, She had a way with bees. You could have sworn they did as she bid them.’
‘I was told that she left when she was ill,’ Hannah told him. ‘They would have kept her on but she would not stay when she could not do the work. She said the old ought to take themselves off like beasts do when they are near to dying. She was last seen heading up to the high mountains.’
‘I can ask about for you,’ Mellow offered gently. ‘See if anyone took her in.’
‘She would not have let them,’ Hannah said.
Mellow let it go at that, and invited her to have some mead and pie with him. He had not offered meat from the spit because he remembered she did not eat it. One thing led to another and when the picking season ended, she went to work on Mellow Farm where there was a wheel and a kiln and a few tools left over from when there had been a pottery. It was a small farm but well cared for, and the beasts and men and women that worked there were all contented. Hannah found contentment among them, living out the simple rhythms and hard rewarding work of farm life. By the end of wintertime, she had replaced all of the rough pottery in the household and there was a little over to sell at the Moonfair so that she could buy cloth for a dress and a few bits and pieces she needed.
At the fair, she sold the pots and then walked with Mellow to see what was on offer. She spotted a cat and its kittens in the back of a Travelling Jack’s wagon and slipped around into the shadows to croon at the pretty things. Mellow reached out and petted her hair as if he couldn’t stop himself. And when she set down the kitten she was holding and turned to look at him they were eye to eye for she was tall. He was red and she felt her own cheeks hot, and that made her smile. Seeing it snipped some thread holding him back and with a soft sigh, he gathered her into his arms and kissed her tenderly, then with gathering hunger, until she found herself winding her own arms about his neck.
By the end of spring he asked her to bond. They did not speak of wiving or wedding in the Land. Love had been an unexpected gift, for she’d never seen herself as lovable. The only one who had loved her, other than Cassandra and her mother, who had both gone away, had been Evander, and his love had more to do with wanting what he could not have. He always wanted things that were out of reach, ever since he was a baby. But Mellow was how she had imagined her father might have been. All kind humility and gentleness; never seeing his own worth.
In time Hannah had given birth to the two daughters her mother had foreseen for her. Bonny and sweet they had been and all three of them had wept together when Mellow died of a fever after rescuing a goat from a half frozen bog in the bitter wintertime.
‘Those goats,’ Nell laughed through her tears. ‘I always said he loved them to death.’
Hannah had been tempted to read the rest of her mother’s letter then, but she resisted and in time both girls were wed, Nell to a farmer’s younger son, Dace, who’d come to work Mellow farm after its master died, and Ivory to a clever dandy of a scriber from Arandelft, with a little house not too far from Mellow’s brother’s farm. Then came the first grandchild, Daisy. Looking at her, red and wrinkled and fresh as her mother had been before her, Hannah had a sudden memory of seeing her own mother gazing up at a moon hanging full and ripe over a red desert. She had not known she had developed the habit of gazing at the moon herself until Nell, seeing her looking up one night asked, ‘Will you go up into the mountains when you are old, like grandmama did?’ Nell had only been seven at the time, and a solemn and acceptant child, unlike pretty, demanding Ivory.
‘Not while you and your sister need me,’ Hannah had answered her solemnly.
* * * *
In the years before Mellow died, Evander came several times to the farm. The first time, he had searched her out to apologise for the way they had parted. He told her that his mother had been taken by Gadfian pirates as she walked along the shore one night not long after Hannah left. He was now leader of the Twentyfamilies. He was only twenty-one but the weight of the responsibility had steadied him and ground the sharp edges of his arrogance. His apology had been sincere and she had liked the earnestness with which he swore to do all his mother had asked of him. He told her somewhat wearily that although the Councilmen had been forced to honour the safe passage agreement his mother had wrung from them for the sake of a rich annual tithe, they had contrived to turn it into a ban on gypsies having any permanent home.
‘In the end it matters not,’ he had said. ‘We are looked upon with doubt and distrust by other folk.’
‘What of Stonehill and all your mother’s sculptings?’ Hannah had asked, for Cassandra had possessed a true and rare gift.
‘Many of the sculptures are still there simply because they would be near impossible to move safely, but no one lives in the buildings, for I have ensured that the place has an uncanny air. That stopped the treacherous Councilmen profiting from their perfidy. We call there often enough in our wanderings to tend the stone garden.’
‘Do you know why your mother bargained so hard to turn you all into homeless gypsies?’ Hannah had asked. It was a thing she had never understood.
Evander had given her a long look before telling her, with his new seriousness, that he did know, but could not explain it to her since it was connected to promises her mother had exacted of his when they were in the Red Land, before he was born. He was permitted to tell no one but the son or daughter that would one day take his place as Director of the Twentyfamilies gypsies. That hurt. Perhaps he saw it, for he told her he was to take a wife that summer, since he must have an heir. She had seen then that his feelings for her had not changed. She told him quietly that children were a great comfort in life. She had Nell then, a quiet babe in arms.
‘Your Mellow is a good man,’ Evander said, when they were walking back to the house.
Hannah knew he saw that in the way he had always had of seeing those sorts of things, but she only said, smiling to take the sting out of it, that she did not need telling.
‘Do you mind if I call in from time to time?’ he had asked, but it was Mellow he looked at as they walked him to their front gate.
‘Some of my neighbours say gypsying folk need watching, but you are Hannah’s friend and as she tells it, your mother mothered her, so you come when you like. Pasture here in winter if it pleases you.’
‘That’s kind. We might,’ Evander had said.
‘He loves you,’ Mellow murmured that night.
‘Yes,’ Hannah said. ‘And I love you.’
* * * *
That had been all that needed saying. They had always spoken the truth to one another and where something could not be said, nothing was said and that was all right, too.
* * * *
Hannah had a sudden stabbing sorrow for the loss of such a man, and yet they had had a good long life together and he had died in his bed with his women weeping about him and his workers sorrowing honestly for him. The beasts had lowed and howled, too, though that was because of Hannah’s grieving, which they felt, save maybe for the goats that had loved him.
Evander had come back several years running after that first visit, though his troop, as they now called themselves, never did winter. Then one day Evander’s woman came riding up, red-eyed and stormy with sorrow, a little boy with two-coloured eyes like Evander’s riding behind her. Both were as dark-skinned as Cassandra and her son and many of those who had made that first journey with them. She told Hannah that Evander had died after a fall from a horse. He had been taken on his own command to be buried on Stonehill, but his last wish had been for her to be told of his passing.
‘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 come 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 nearly 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.
‘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 one 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 was 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.
She thought of making camp and staved off stopping with Mellow’s words, but her knee was bad enough that she had begun to limp. She would bandage it when she stopped and she told herself that she was lucky to have been able to abandon the wretched contamination suit, for aside from being uncomfortably hot and difficult to manoeuver, it had stunk and she had stunk in it. Nevertheless she had bundled it up and tied it to the bottom of her pack with her sleeping roll, because Mama’s letter had not bidden her abandon it. She might very well come across another stretch of poisoned Blacklands before she reached the end of the dark road or maybe she would have need of it, in the city at the end of the Black road.
She stumbled again and this time her bad knee gave way under her. She fell half on the Black road and half on the soft hot sand. She had not the strength to lever herself up, but mindful of her mother’s warning to keep to the road, she rolled over onto her back until she lay wholly upon it. She was startled to see the moon riding above her. Was it true what Mama said of the moon, she wondered, half delirious with thirst and dehydration. The people of that lost time had been magicians and miracle workers by all accounts.
She tried to get up, but she had not the strength.
‘I promised,’ she said through gritted teeth. The words croaked out for her mouth was dry as a bone. She gave a shivering laugh and then lay back and slept until panic woke her and gave her strength and clarity for a moment. She levered herself over and reached for the sack containing her mothers’ bones, weeping with relief to find she had not spilled them out into the swallowing sand. Or would have wept if there had been any moisture in her to weep out. She lay her face against the sack of bones and wondered if someday the Seeker would walk upon the same road and find her bones clutching a sack of bones. What a mystery it would be. But the Seeker would fail in her quest if Hannah failed to bring her mother’s bones to lie with her father’s in his grave. She thought of the unread pages of the letter, but she did not take them out.
You can always go on longer than you think you can, Mellow coaxed.
Hannah closed her eyes and slept. Cassandra’s cat came and looked at her with his one bright yellow eye. ‘Get up, funaga, or you will die and be meat for the crows. Get up or the efari will come and if they take you, you will die a captive and the world will die with you.’
Hannah had woken with the clear memory of the honey pot she had pushed into the side of the pack. With trembling fingers, she found it miraculously unbroken, and she undid the lid and licked the sweetness and the wetness from her fingers. It was too sweet and not wet enough, but it strengthened her.
She sat up.
She must have slept for hours, for though it was dark and stars glittered overhead, the moon had set and she could see by the sword of light along the eastern horizon that it was nearing dawn. She stood somehow, using the goat staff to lever her up and ignored the pain shooting through her knee. All around her the undulating dunes had a greenish look, as if they were ripples underneath the water. It was then, as she stood swaying on her feet, that she saw the city. It was so far off that she could not have seen it save for the lights, and they would not have shown in the daytime or even when the moon was up.
The city at the end of the Black road.
Hannah’s heart trembled at the realisation that she was going to make it after all. Mama had been right. They had journeyed along the Black road together, and they would come to its end, together.
She sat down again and took out her mother’s letter in readiness for when the sun rose, so that she could read the last of it.
* * * *
When you create a world, it can be so enticing and interesting and delicious a place to inhabit that you keep going back and back until no corner is unexplored, no map name unplumbed. This results in the sort of unfortunate series that goes on and on with no true end in sight. But a book or even a series is a journey, and so it ought to plot the same narrow course through an invented world as our lives do through this world. Having said that, I loved revisiting the world of Tehanu in The Other Wind; and in the exquisite collection of stories, Tales of Earthsea, Ursula Le Guin returned to that invented world. The foreword to that collection, explaining the enticements of a world to its creator, is profound and beautiful and wise, and reading Tales from Earthsea made me think how wonderful it would be to write another story set in the world of Obernewtyn. Not a story that was a continuation of Elspeth’s story, but a tale by a character who might catch only a glimpse of Elspeth and her time.
Then serendipity and morphic resonance conspired and Jack Dann wrote to ask if I would like to write a story set in a world I had invented for a collection he was putting together. Aside from uttering a resounding ‘yes please’, a dozen possibilities bubbled to the surface of my mind, for I had created lots of worlds and the idea of visiting many of them was appealing. For a time the creative cauldron was a seething mess. But when it, and I, cooled, I came back to my original idea.
So here is the story of a character who is almost completely invisible in the Obernewtyn Chronicles, unless you know where to look for her. Her story reveals a secret that readers of the Obernewtyn series cannot otherwise discover.
— Isobelle Carmody