Quintessence Sky (38 page)

According to plan, Elizabeth, Joan, and
Blanca split off in a different direction. Ramos stayed with the
other men, leading Antonia by the hand. Before long, they could see
a clearing in the trees ahead. Ramos heard people talking and
smelled the smoke of fires. They emerged to see about a hundred
people, many of them working to erect several buildings out of
stone blocks and wooden beams. It was a moment before Ramos
recognized what he was seeing.

The colonists were cutting up several large,
recently-felled trees for their wood. Instead of using saws,
however, they were using their hands. One would drive his hand into
the trunk as easily as if it were air, tracing out the desired
shape, and then remove the wood, cut with an edge as smooth as if
it had been carefully sanded. The stone was quarried using the same
method. Ramos had experience with matter passing through other
matter, of course, but it had not realized it could be used to
separate the atoms making up a material, and to see people doing it
in so casual and efficient a manner took his breath away. The other
men in his party seemed unimpressed, and Ramos marveled at how
easily miracles could become commonplace when you saw them every
day.

The work stopped as the colonists noticed
them. Bishop Marcheford strode confidently into their midst, and
Ramos followed in his wake with the others. "Where is Ferguson?"
Marcheford bellowed. His face was thunderous, and Ramos had to
admit he could put on an intimidating show. He spoke like a
preacher, with the force of Scripture and the threat of brimstone
rumbling under the words.

A tall man with such a weak chin that his
face seemed to slide straight into his neck without interruption
ducked into view from behind a stack of cut stone. "I thought I
told you never to come back," he said. He tried to match
Marcheford's tone, but he didn't have the voice for it, and he just
came off sounding petulant.

"James Ferguson, you are hereby deposed as
governor of Horizon," Marcheford pronounced. "By order of the
rightful queen of England and this colony."

"Queen?" Ferguson said. He sneered as he
advanced on Marcheford. "You have no salt, no friends, and nothing
to offer these people. Even if you were here to apologize, I would
run you off. As it is, you and your son and . . ." Ferguson trailed
off as he saw Ramos. His eyes traveled up and down his body, and
Ramos was conscious of his dark hair and Mediterranean features,
not to mention the clerical garb he was still wearing. He was
clearly Spanish, and a priest besides. "You didn't," Ferguson
said.

Now other people were taking notice, and
their eyes darted to the edges of the clearing.

"He sold us out!" Ferguson yelled. "He told
the Spanish where we are."

Everyone came to their feet now, abandoning
their building materials and scanning the trees for signs of
attack. This was not going well.

"Listen, you young idiot," Marcheford said,
his tone of confident command slipping. "I'm a bishop of the
Anglican church. Do you think I would go running to a pack of
papists?"

Ramos felt a surge of irritation, but he let
it pass. He was, after all, throwing his lot in with exiles and
heretics. He couldn't expect them to speak well of the Roman
Church.

"Who's he, then? And why are you ordering us
about in the name of Queen Mary?" Ferguson said.

"Not Mary," Marcheford said, exasperated. He
made an attempt to bring the stentorian tone back to his voice. "I
mean Her Majesty, trueborn daughter of King Henry the Eighth, Queen
Elizabeth!"

At this pronouncement, a light blazed from
the other side of the clearing. Every head turned in time to see
Elizabeth striding out of the forest, aglow with quintessence
light. It was a trick anyone in the colony could do, with
quintessence water in their veins and enough salt to fuel it, but
Elizabeth pulled it off with a ceremonial majesty that left no
doubt as to her identity. The light streamed over her bare scalp,
giving the impression of flowing, red-blond hair. Behind her,
Blanca and Joan Parris walked, as if holding her train.

Elizabeth glided into the center of the
stunned gathering, as poised as if she were arriving at a ball.
Ramos knew she must still be terrified, not just of these people,
but of the strangeness of the quintessence light streaming out of
her body. But she gave no sign of it. She had slipped on majesty
like a mask at a costume ball, and she radiated strength and
purpose. "I am Elizabeth," she said. "I command your
allegiance."

Ferguson opened and closed his mouth, unequal
to the moment. Ramos watched him, knowing that the spell could be
broken with a word. But Ferguson seemed entranced. He walked
forward like a man in a dream, his eyes only on Elizabeth. She
beamed at him, her beautiful face radiant despite the dirt still
smudged there. He kneeled, rapt, and kissed her outstretched
hand.

The other colonists rushed forward, kneeling
in the dirt in front of her and reaching out to touch her hand or
dress. Ramos remembered that these were Protestant refugees who had
been forced to flee their homeland for their beliefs. To them,
Elizabeth was a heroine, a saint, the savior they dreamed would
take the throne someday and turn their nation back to
Protestantism. And suddenly, here she was, the Protestant princess,
impossibly materialized on this island. Most of them knew her face,
but even those who had never seen her before recognized royalty in
every graceful gesture and angle of her body.

"I will be as good to you as ever a queen was
to her people," Elizabeth said. "Follow me, and I will lead you
with all my will and power. And be persuaded that, at need for your
safety, I will not hesitate to spend my blood."

Ramos already knew she was a remarkable
woman, but he was amazed once again. She had done the impossible,
simply by walking in and speaking it into being. Never mind that
scant hours ago, she had stood on a scaffold, about to lose her
head, and then had been thrown into this bizarre land with no
preparation, a step ahead of death. She was now the undisputed
queen of this colony. Whatever quarrels these people had harbored,
they were forgotten, at least for this moment, swept aside in their
united devotion to her. Ramos realized that he, too, was in love
with her—not the everyday attraction a man might have for a woman,
but the veneration of a mortal man for a goddess.

"I require shelter and refreshment, and then
I will hold council," Elizabeth said. "We have much to
discuss."

CHAPTER 23

FROM Antonia's description of her
experiences, Catherine began to piece together an understanding of
what had happened.

"So you were all born at the end of May?"
Catherine said.

"The first group of us," Antonia said.
"Everyone I asked, anyway. The second group that came was born in
early February."

Catherine and Maasha Kaatra were sitting in
the sheltered overhang where the manticores had left them, while
Antonia flitted above them.

"Their souls must have been linked to the
part of the sky that corresponds to your birth," Catherine said.
"Maybe even with a normal quintessence thread, like we use all the
time. When Maasha Kaatra drew the energy out of the sky, it drew
the threads with it. Literally yanking your souls out of your
bodies and bringing them here."

Antonia circled closer in lazy spirals. "I
don't understand. The stars rotate around the Earth. If our souls
were tied to the stars, wouldn't they be pulled out of our bodies
every day as the heavens moved in their courses?"

Catherine was amazed. This girl, alone among
all these roaming spirits, had been able to evaluate her situation
and deduce what was happening to her. She had gathered enough
information from talking with the others to realize that they all
had similar birthdays, and that those birthdays corresponded to the
appearance of the novas. What fourteen-year-old girl had the
education to know so much about astronomy? And now she was asking
difficult questions about the structure of the universe. She
reminded Catherine of herself at that age, but Catherine had
benefitted from her father's example. Who had taught Antonia to
think of the natural world in so logical a way?

"Quintessence connections stretch as far as
they need to. They're not like physical threads; they can stretch
across the world," Catherine said.

"Then why were our souls pulled away at
all?"

Another good question. Catherine remembered
the experiment in Sinclair's house when he had successfully brought
a bird back from the dead. The bird's spirit had leaped up out of
the void along a quintessence thread and into the bird's body. If
it were possible for a spirit to be transmitted along a
quintessence thread . . .

"Maybe the connection is still there, between
your body and the stars. Perhaps what Maasha Kaatra did just pulled
your soul along that connection to Horizon."

Antonia's light bobbed more vigorously. "So
there might be a way to send us back?"

Catherine nodded slowly. "We'll do everything
we can to make that happen."

It was a compelling thought, that all the
souls on Earth were connected to the quintessence generated by the
stars. It implied that life itself was a product of quintessence.
Which was no surprise, given what had happened when Sinclair had
brought Catherine back from the dead, causing such an imbalance
that the entire island had started to be dragged over the Edge.

Or maybe it wasn't an imbalance at all. They
had assumed it was the weight of her soul that had pulled the
island, speculating that in quintessence terms, a single human soul
weighed more than the entire landmass of the island. But what if it
wasn't the weight of her soul, but its connection to the sky that
caused the problem. When her soul was drawn out of the void without
the benefit of a flexible quintessence thread connecting Earth to
sky, perhaps it was the sky itself that was dragging the island
over the Edge, as it continued along its normal rotation.

She had no way of testing the hypothesis
experimentally, at least not yet, but it was an intriguing
idea.

"Catherine Parris," said a strained voice.
She knew it instantly as a manticore voice, from the unnatural way
it pronounced the English syllables, but it wasn't until she looked
up that she recognized him.

She jumped to her feet. "Tanalabrinu!" She
pulled the manticore into an embrace. The gesture was odd to
manticores, but they understood its intended meaning. Tanalabrinu
had not always approved of her, particularly when she had bonded
with his uncle, Chichirico. He understood how much she had valued
Chichirico, however, and so he had always treated her respectfully.
She wouldn't normally have hugged him, but she was so glad to see a
face that she recognized, one who could speak the same language and
would have word from home, that she couldn't help herself.

His news, however, was not good. He told her
of the burning of the human settlement, the arrival of the Spanish,
the attempt by Rinchirith to unite the tribes into a single nation,
and more recently, his alliance with the Spanish. Catherine reeled
with each new revelation, hardly able to accept them. She had been
gone mere days, hadn't she? But no, according to Tanalabrinu,
several weeks had passed since her trek into the forest. It didn't
seem possible. Had she lost time? Or was it just that hard to judge
the passage of days when deep underground?

"What of my parents?" she said. "What of
Matthew?"

"Your father and Matthew are alive. I have
bonded your father and promised them alliance. Through that bond, I
know that your mother is also alive, as is your friend Blanca."

"But where are they living? What are they
doing?"

"I will show you. First you must know that
all the tribes that did not follow Rinchirith have allied
themselves to me, and through me, to you. I fear there will be war.
What shall I say to them?"

"Thank them for me, for their friendship. But
please let me go now, and join Matthew and my parents."

"You do not understand. The tribes expect you
to lead them. To defend us against Rinchirith and the Spanish
both."

"What? They expect
me
to lead
them?"

"The lords of the earth have spoken. You have
been judged, and found worthy for the single, great task that is
set before you. What greater task than to restore peace among our
people?"

"But I know nothing of war. I'm no
strategist; I'm a eighteen-year-old girl. I can't inspire
confidence or urge bravery. Any decision I made would be a
disaster."

Maasha Kaatra spoke up for the first time
from his position on the ground with chin resting on knees. "I
don't think he wants you to make any decisions."