The Golden Specific (35 page)

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Climes

F
ROM
HER
SEAT
upon the horse, in front of Goldenrod, Sophia considered the landscape before her, trying to imagine it as a being: an individual who stretched for miles, containing plains and mountains and caves, who was able to feel the waterways inside itself and the ocean lapping at its edges.

She hesitated, disbelieving. “You mean—this place around us—it is awake?” She could feel Goldenrod breathing.

“Yes,” the Eerie said with a smile in her voice. “Awake and aware. It is as sentient as you and I.”

Sophia looked at the scrub grass and the yellowed almond trees, the outcroppings of stone, and the pebbly earth, stirred by their passage. “It can . . . hear us?”

“In more ways than you can imagine. Its manner of perceiving and understanding is far more powerful than ours. We do not know how, but it seems the Climes are cognizant of everything that occurs within their sphere.”

The sky was an inverted blue bowl overhead. “How big is it—is this one?”

“We are at the edge of a vast Clime that stretches from the coast to include Seville and most of what we see here around us. But farther east, on the road ahead, are two others.”

“The Dark Age,” Sophia breathed.

“Indeed—the Dark Age. And Ausentinia. I sense its presence, though I cannot hear its voice.”

The significance of this worked its way through Sophia's mind. “But you can hear the Dark Age?”

“No,” Goldenrod said, troubled. “I cannot. It is unlike any Clime I have ever encountered. It seems . . . absent. But that would be impossible.”

Rosemary spoke for the first time. “What you say of these old ones seems very true to me. I have almost suspected this, knowing Ausentinia. The way its paths would appear and reappear, as if the city itself wished to guide us. And the Dark Age, too, though you cannot hear it. For how else would the Ages battle with one another as they have, taking pieces and losing them, fighting for them again?”

“We saw on Cabeza de Cabra's map that the Dark Age had pushed through the hills of Ausentinia, all the way to the stone bridge,” Sophia said.

Rosemary gave a sharp nod. “And farther. After the sheriff left, the Dark Age expanded north and east.”

“Past Murtea?”

“Well past. One day we woke to find it almost at the village wall. Everyone fled. The next month, I returned with the caravan. Murtea was no more. Before it would take more than three days to ride from Seville to the border of the Dark Age. Now it takes less than two.”

“So the Dark Age must be a Clime like any other,” Goldenrod mused. “This is what they do when they are unsettled: they shift and grow or contract. It is what happened all at once during the Great Disruption—the War of Climes.”

“The War of Climes,” Sophia repeated. The words shocked her with the world of meaning they implied. A new map unfurled in her mind: one that was living, breathing, in conflict with itself.

“The Climes themselves have kept its cause hidden, so I cannot tell you what provoked it—one of their many mysteries. But we know that the disagreement grew, became violent, and finally resulted in the alienation and division that we have now. And they have not been still. Of late, especially, there have been hostilities—bitter arguments that change the shape of the world as we know it. Not only here, with the Dark Age.”

“The glacier that moved north last year . . .” Sophia began.

“Yes. A southern Clime that rushed northward. Once again, we do not know why.”

Sophia fell silent and became lost in thought, her mind
whirling with the consequences of what Goldenrod had explained. Could it be that none of the scholars and scientists in New Occident, none of the cartologers and explorers Shadrack knew—none of them was even close to understanding the Great Disruption, because none of them perceived how the world really was? Sophia felt momentarily dizzy; the learned city of Boston suddenly seemed very tiny and very poor in knowledge. If these Climes existed, then so much of what she had considered inexplicable now made sense. The more she turned it over in her mind, the more undeniably true it appeared.

“So they
are
like the pagan gods,” Errol concluded. “They do battle and subject humans to their whims without bothering to consider the consequences.”

Goldenrod hesitated. “They are entirely different. But perhaps you could say your pagans understood by some instinct that the old ones existed, and they attempted, imperfectly, to explain them by describing gods with human aspects.”

“War is war,” Errol said flatly. He held his arm up for Seneca, who landed with a ruffle of feathers. “Only selfish creatures engage in it.”

“I do not disagree with you there,” Goldenrod said. “You can see why the Eerie hold this knowledge secret. With our capacity to speak to the Climes, perhaps even bend their will through persuasion . . . there are many who would want to use such capacities for terrible ends.”

They took cover from the worst of the midday heat in Rosemary's caravan. Through the white curtains, the sunlight
illuminated a room more spacious and more lovely than Sophia had expected. At the front of the wagon, a bed built atop a low wardrobe lay below a window. Two ceiling lamps held the newly scavenged eyes from the fourwings, which were dull and lifeless in the bright sunlight. Shelves and cabinets, many of them painted with gray birds, covered the wall to her right, and these were filled with crockery, jars, and baskets. To the left, a black stove sat short and squat on a large square of painted tiles. Low leather chairs shaped like pincushions had been embroidered in blue and white thread by someone with a patient hand.

It was evident to Sophia that much of the caravan's contents had been made by Rosemary herself. She invited them to sit, taking a loaf of bread and a pot of butter from one of the cabinets painted with gray birds. She poured water from a blue jug.

Sophia thanked her and ate eagerly. She had left the inn without breakfast, and it seemed ages since their meal the previous night.

“You have a comfortable home,” Errol said to Rosemary with appreciation.

“It is luxurious compared to how you travel, Errol,” Goldenrod remarked, smiling.

“I care little for luxury. But I envy that you are able to carry your home with you,” he admitted to Rosemary.

“There is little to envy,” Rosemary said matter-of-factly. “I lost an entire farm. What you see are the collected pieces of what survived.”

“Forgive me,” he apologized. “But you must admit there
is also ingenuity, along with fragments of a lost life. The crossbow—you made it yourself, did you not?”

“I did. I grew tired of fleeing the fourwings every time I heard their detestable cries.” She handed him the crossbow and Errol examined it appraisingly. “And you? What of your home?”

Errol handed the crossbow back. “The only shreds of home I carry are the bow and the boots. Everything else you see has been found in the Papal States, from Seneca to the laces.”

“You must miss it,” Sophia said.

“I do, miting. Oswin, my sister Cat, my mother and father, my grandfather; we are—” He paused. “We were a happy family.”

Sophia offered him a smile. “I hope you will be again.”

“There is something more you have forgotten,” Goldenrod interjected. “Surely you carry your home in your heart and mind.”

“That is true,” Errol assented. “I carry the green hills, the smell of rain in early spring. Long evenings in winter watching my mother and sister with their sewing. The old ruins where my brother and I would play as children.” He sighed.

“We should continue,” Rosemary said, rising from her seat. “The next stretch of road is full of abandoned farms, and there are frequent attacks from the fourwings.”

• • •

A
S
THEY
LEFT
the caravan for the midday heat, Errol watched Sophia, chiding himself for mentioning his parents and grandfather. He could see her slipping back into her thoughts, back into the sorrowful memories of the beaded map.

“I will tell you what I miss most about home, miting,” Errol said as he helped her up onto the saddle before Goldenrod. “I miss the stories we told each other in the evenings. After a meal, instead of dashing out into blinding sunlight to flee mad clerics, we would tell tales.”

Sophia gave a slight smile. “That does sound more agreeable.”

“Vastly more agreeable,” Errol said, swinging up into his saddle. “Sometimes for laughter, sometimes for tears, sometimes for the lesson contained in the telling. As we ride east toward the Dark Age, I have in mind a story my grandfather would often recount. The story of Edolie and the woodsman. If none of you objects, I will tell it.”

“Is it a story about an archer valiantly protecting three women in a dark forest?” Goldenrod asked lightly.

Errol pursed his lips thoughtfully. “That is an even better story. I will tell it to you when we reach Granada. First, Edolie and the woodsman.”

As they set off, he gathered his thoughts and finally spoke. “It is a Faierie tale. My grandfather changed it very little over the years, which leads me to believe that it was truer than most. He always began by reminding us of one important thing: Faieries are not all good and not all evil. They are much like us, in that they combine the good and the bad, and they sometimes change before our very eyes, becoming the opposite of what they were. You must judge for yourselves what manner of Faierie this story describes.”

And with that, he began.

“There was once a little girl who lived in a small village at
the edge of the forest. She was a wayward child, who from the time she was very small came and went as she pleased, venturing into the forest despite its many dangers. Though they tried to keep her close, her parents could not contain her, and at least once with each waning and waxing of the moon the girl disappeared into the forest for hours, driving them to despair until she returned, cheerful and unharmed, recounting in her child's voice the adventures she had had with the Faieries.

“When she grew into adulthood, she began to lose her interest in the forest, and her parents were greatly relieved. There was no more talk of Faieries. Indeed, she no longer remembered them. They began to seem like something she had imagined in those infantile days when she liked to entertain herself with things that were not real. As will happen to young people, she lost her interest in the world of magic and began thinking about love.

“She had heard so many stories about falling in love, a thing both wondrously beautiful and terribly painful, that she watched for it always, the way one watches for a bad cold in winter. But it did not happen. She knew all the people in her village—boys and girls, women and men—and none of them inspired that malady in her. But then, she had known them all her life. Once or twice she felt a pinch of something in her heart—something both beautiful and painful—and wondered if that was it. But no, she decided. That was not love.

“It was customary in this place and time to marry young. When children reached Sophia's age,” Errol said, raising his voice slightly, “they could already begin thinking of marriage.”

Sophia turned to him in surprise.

Errol smiled. “Not that you should, Sophia. And nor did our heroine, Edolie. In fact, for more than ten years, despite her watchfulness for the arrival of that mysterious ailment, she showed no symptoms of love, nor any interest in marriage, and her parents began to accept that she would never add to their family with a husband and children. Edolie herself began to think less about the malady she had once both dreaded and wished for.