The Golden Specific (30 page)

Errol turned back toward the farmhouse, sheathing his sword. “How did you do that? Where did that windstorm come from?” he demanded as he entered.

Goldenrod ignored his questions. “We must see to the captives,” she said, edging past him through the doorway.

Errol shook his head, but he followed without protest. Pack and satchel in hand, Sophia hurried after them.

The string of prisoners sat, heedless of the heat and dust, by the side of the road. Some were sprawled, however their bonds allowed, flat upon the ground. “You mean to douse them with Faierie powder?” Errol asked, coming up beside Goldenrod.

“Will you cut their bonds, Errol? They will panic if they return to their senses and find themselves bound.”

Errol went among the prisoners, cutting the ropes that held them to each other. Most were women. Two were aging, white-haired men. Three were children, and one of these was only just old enough to walk alone. Errol carefully cut the ropes around their waists until all were free, and then he stepped back. “Wait a moment, now,” he said to Goldenrod. “I have no need of another dose.”

“These wanderers are cannier than the ones I know,” Goldenrod said, more to herself than to them. “I wonder where they come from.” She raised her bare hands in front of her, palms up, and they filled with yellow blooms. Errol and Sophia watched as she tossed them before her, the petals expanding like a cloud that then sank, slowly, onto the oblivious sufferers. Several of them coughed. Some began to speak, as if waking from a long slumber, and one of the children started crying. “They will be fine now.”

“Where will they go?” Sophia asked worriedly.

Errol was looking to the west. “They will go back to Seville. We must go on without them. And quickly.”

“The other rider?” Goldenrod asked.

“Yes. Who called us witches. It will not be long before he returns with reinforcements. We will have to leave, despite the sun and the risk. Come along, miting,” he said to Sophia. “Do not worry about them,” he added, indicating the recovering, disoriented plague victims. “We have greater worries.”

Goldenrod looked at him attentively. “Is this Order of the Golden Cross so powerful? Can we not simply avoid them?”

Errol laughed. “They cannot be avoided. They have informers everywhere, and more clerics than you can imagine. Now they suspect Sophia of carrying the plague and us of practicing witchcraft.” He frowned. “You do not like it when I accuse you of being a Faierie. Well, then. I wonder how you will like it when they accuse you of being a witch.”

 31 

Wanderers

“W
HAT
IS
A
miting?” Sophia asked Errol as they rode east. She sat behind Goldenrod, her arms wrapped around the Eerie's waist. Errol had captured the horses of the two fallen riders, and Goldenrod had been able to calm them. They moved twice as fast toward Granada now, the horses kicking up dust as they went.

“It is a little mite,” Errol said, smiling from under his gray hood.

“What is a mite?”

“It is like a tick. A little insect that bites you and gets under your skin and is impossible to pull out.”

Sophia was momentarily too indignant to reply. “You think I am like a bloodsucking insect.”

Errol laughed, a soft, low sound. “I say it with admiration. You hold on—a tough little thing with a tough little shell.”

“Oh,” she said, somewhat appeased. “I'm not that little.”

“No, you are not. But you are the smallest of our company and possibly the sturdiest, so I reserve the right to call you ‘miting.'”

“But I am not the sturdiest either.”

Errol considered. “It is not that you are the sturdiest altogether, but you are resilient in your kindheartedness. I have seen it more than once now. You worry for others when the peril is to yourself.” He smiled at her. “It is as foolish as it is honorable.”

Sophia did not know what to say to this. “At your age,” Errol continued, “I would not have worried so for the plight of others. And you, Faierie?” His voice changed. There was a note of respect that had not been there before. “Were you so driven to rescue the helpless when you were younger?”

Sophia could not see Goldenrod's face, but she imagined the Eerie looking calmly ahead, untroubled. “It is our custom to offer aid to anyone we encounter, if we are able to provide it. We are all this way—it is not my particular quality.”

• • •

S
OPHIA
EXPLAINED
TO
Goldenrod, as she had to Errol, why she had come to the Papal States, what had happened aboard the
Verity
, and what waited for her at the Nihilismian depository in
Granada. Goldenrod did not say that the journey seemed long for a diary, and she did not question the wisdom of leaving the port of Seville when aid was forthcoming.

For most of the long day, Errol and Goldenrod listened for the signs they anticipated of the Golden Cross. But the hours passed quietly. By dusk, Sophia had fallen asleep against the Eerie's back. She woke to the sound of Errol's bow twanging in the stillness. Before her on the horse, Goldenrod sat more alertly. “What were those?”

“Phantoms,” Errol replied quietly.

Sophia shifted to look, but she saw only Errol, retrieving his two arrows, and a sign.
LA PALOMA GRIS,
the sign read, over a cracked painting of a pigeon. She felt a pang of sharp regret that she had missed seeing Minna.

“What do you mean, ‘phantoms'?” Goldenrod asked.

“Just that.”

“But they spoke.”

“Nothing of substance,” Errol replied tersely. “They will return again tomorrow at dusk if you wish to exchange words with them, though I doubt you will find it a useful conversation.” He lifted Sophia down from the horse. “I know the innkeeper here at the Gray Pigeon. She will hide us if the Order arrives.”

The innkeeper greeted Errol with a toothless smile and a warm embrace. There were no other travelers, and after bringing them a jug of water, a pot of stew, a plate of almonds and olives, and a wide loaf of bread, she hung up her apron and retreated to her own rooms.

They rested in a common room hung with hammocks—
evidence of days long gone in which the Papal States still traded with the United Indies. As Errol and Goldenrod settled in, Sophia took the beaded map from her satchel. “Goldenrod?” Sophia peeked through the weave of her hammock to see if the Eerie was awake.

“Yes?”

“How did you do it? The flowers in your hands. Can all the Eerie heal that way?”

Goldenrod's brown hair was spread out across the hammock, and her green skirts spilled over its edges. She had removed her white headscarf and dropped it to the floor. Her soft-soled leather shoes, with long laces like her gloves, lay beside it, and her small green feet were propped on the hammock's webbing. She shifted so that she was sitting upright and looked across at Sophia. Errol, his arms crossed over his chest where he hung in his own hammock, was listening attentively as well.

“We call ourselves not Eerie,” she began, “but the Elodea—Elodeans. I believe we are called ‘Eerie' by people in New Occident because we live near the Eerie Sea. They confuse us with the Erielhonan, the true Erie, who were long ago dispersed by war. It is a habit I have observed in New Occident—the misnaming of people and places based on fragmentary knowledge. We are from the far west, from the ocean. In a better world, our knowledge would not be secret. But we have learned from long experience that many people use this knowledge for ill.

“People of the Baldlands and New Occident believe we are healers,” she said. She contemplated her palms. “But we are not
healers so much as interpreters. You see how Errol can speak both the language of his people in the Closed Empire and the language of people here, in the Papal States?”

“Yes,” Sophia said.

“What I do is the same, only I speak not the languages of different people but the languages of different beings.”

Errol and Sophia considered this, each imagining it to mean different things. Errol's mind drifted to all the strange creatures—goblins, pixies, elves—of his grandfather's stories, while Sophia thought about badgers and bears. “Do you mean beings like animals?” she asked.

“Partly. I spoke to the horses earlier, and they told me a good deal about this Order of the Golden Cross. And Seneca, while of a reserved nature, has shared some interesting stories about Errol.” She glanced smilingly at Errol, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. “But I mean other beings, as well. In our Age—and in our history before the Great Disruption—Elodeans have always had the gift of many languages. To us, it seemed ordinary; the way of the world. It was only through contact with the people of the Baldlands and the Indian Territories—and later, people of eastern New Occident—that we realized you do not communicate as we do. This results in many conflicts, some of which you perceive and some of which you do not. The world is filled with beings with which you hold no communication.”

“You mean the Fey world,” Errol said.

“No, not what you believe is the Fey world, although perhaps some of those beings are the ones I mean. Consider what
people call the plague here—
lapena
. Yes, it is an illness, much like a fever brought on by typhus or some other disease. But
lapena
is actually a fever of the heart. Just as with typhus, it is caused by creatures imperceptible to the eye. The tiny wanderers who cause the plague are, themselves, displaced beings; I have not understood yet from where. But they are troubled, discontented, and rootless. They take company with people in a misguided effort to make space for themselves. I speak to them, and the goldenrod blossoms give them something to cling to—like a rope thrown into the sea. They hear me, and take hold of the rope, and climb out. Yet people in the Papal States do not perceive these beings at all; they think of
lapena
as a kind of corruption, or a curse. The being itself goes unnoticed. So it is with other beings, too.”

Sophia and Errol digested this. “That does not explain how you knew what was happening farther up the road,” he objected. “Or what you did with the dust.”

Goldenrod looked up at the ceiling, her hands in her lap. “I am afraid I can say no more. I have already said too much.”

“Can you tell us why—why you can't say more?” Sophia tried again.

“I can tell you this much: for some, our abilities seem a thing of power, so that beings of all kinds might be made to jump and dance and do their bidding.” Her voice was somber.

Sophia was shocked. “The Elodea do that?”

“No, we do not—none of us would do so willingly. But others, who have seen what we do, have tried to use us for those ends.”

“How terrible. You mean . . .” Sophia thought through the
consequences of what Goldenrod had explained. “You mean someone could tell the plague where to go, whom to make sick?”

“Yes. And you must take my word for it that this would be as nothing, compared to the havoc that can be wrought.” Goldenrod sounded weary. She swung her legs over the side of the hammock and stepped onto the dirt floor. “I will take some night air, now that the innkeeper has gone to rest.”

• • •

W
HILE
G
OLDENROD
WALKED
outside and Errol rested in his hammock, Sophia unrolled Cabeza de Cabra's map. With some effort, she drew her thoughts away from the inn and rejoined the sheriff of Murtea where she had left him: the memory of reading the map that would guide him to the Eerie Sea.

Cabeza de Cabra returned to the stone bridge, taking the middle path at each juncture, and walked back to Murtea without encountering anyone. He entered the walled village and was lost from sight.

Sophia was beginning to understand why there were so few glass beads on the map. The city of Ausentinia accounted for many of the metal ones, but the people Cabeza de Cabra remembered were few and far between. She let the time in the map expand while she waited by the village wall; months passed. No doubt many people had come and gone, but Cabeza de Cabra had remained within, policing Murtea, overseeing his deputies, going about his day within the village's narrow confines.

Then, in November, there was a brief memory that appeared suddenly before her: Cabeza de Cabra led two people out of Murtea. It was clear they were prisoners. One was a man with a shaggy head of brown hair and a beard; his hands were tied. The other, accompanied by a deputy, was a girl of about Sophia's age, who kicked and screamed so viciously the deputy lost patience and threw her over his shoulder. “Calm yourself, Rosemary, please,” the other prisoner said in English, with the unmistakable accent of New Occident.

Sophia felt her pulse quicken.
Bruno,
she thought.
This is Bruno Casavetti and the girl Rosemary who helped him. Cabeza de Cabra is the sheriff of Murtea.

“No! No! No!” Rosemary cried. “He is not guilty! He is not a witch!”

The deputy took a sharp step, jolting Rosemary on his armored shoulder.

Sophia felt pity flooding through her—Cabeza de Cabra had compassion for this girl. “Be gentle,” he said gruffly to his deputy. “She is only a child.”

“I beg you, Rosemary,” Bruno said, “they will only hurt you if you protest. And think of how sad that will make me.”

Rosemary quieted, and the group moved on. Suddenly, they were gone; their path had taken them past the map's limit.

With some frustration, Sophia kept her finger on the map's edge. A few minutes later, Cabeza de Cabra and his deputy reappeared. They walked back to Murtea in silence.

In the weeks that followed, the sheriff made frequent
journeys along the short stretch of road that connected the village to what Sophia presumed was the jail. Sometimes he went alone, sometimes he went with a deputy, and a few times he walked alongside a short, round man who wore a heavy golden cross. The Order of the Golden Cross had a cleric in Murtea, she realized.