The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [9]
I told him my one piece of knowledge about the link between animals and humans, gleaned from a Beforetime book my mother had read. It had claimed humans evolved from some hairy animals called apes, which no longer existed as far as I knew, but neither Maruman nor I could feel that was more than a fairy tale.
I had heard many stories about the Great White from my parents as a child, which were different than the stories told by the Herders once I entered the orphan home system.
I remembered little from my childhood, but Herder lessons about the Great White and Beforetime were driven into us during the daily rituals and prayers, exhorting us to seek purity of race and mind. The priest who dealt with such matters at Kinraide was old, with a sharp eye and a hard hand. His manner of preaching often reduced new orphans to screaming hysteria. He made the Beforetime sound like some terrifying concoction of heaven and hell, woven throughout with sloth, indulgence, and pride: the sins suffered by the Oldtimers. The holocaust itself was paraded as the wrath of Lud in all its terrible glory.
This fearful picture was tempered by the stories one heard from other sources, gypsies and traveling jacks and potmenders, who presented the Oldtimers to us as men who flew through the air in golden machines and could live and breathe beneath the sea. Those stories left little doubt that the Beforetime people had possessed some remarkable abilities, however fantasized and exaggerated the details had become.
Maruman had little to offer about the Beforetime. He had more to say about the Great White. Dismissing the Herder version, Maruman said the beastworld believed that men had unleashed the Great White from things they called machines—powerful and violent inanimate creatures set deep under the ground, controlled and fed by men. Beasts called them glarsh.
I questioned him as to how inanimate things could be violent or fed, but he could not explain this apparent paradox.
Maruman said he “remembered” the Great White, and though that was impossible, he wove remarkably frightening pictures of a world in terror. He spoke of the rains that burned whatever they touched, and of the charnel stench. He spoke of the radiant heat that filled the skies and blotted out the night, of the thirst and the hunger and the screaming of those dying, of the invisible poisons that permeated the air and plants and waters of the world. And most of all, he spoke of the deaths of men, children, and women, and of the deaths of beasts, and when I listened, I wept with him, though I did not know if he had imagined it all or if he was somehow really able to remember something he had not seen firsthand.
According to the orthodox history of the Great White, only the righteous were spared. But Maruman said those spared had the luck of living a long way from the center of destruction and that was all. If he was right, then all that the Herders had told us were lies, and the Council, supposedly devised by Lud, was more likely man-made, too.
It was then I had begun to understand what my parents had been fighting for with more than blind loyalty.
Maruman bit me, bored with my musings; then he licked the place as demanded by courtesy. I looked fondly at him, wondering where his wandering had taken him this time.
“Where have you been? I missed you,” I told him.
He purred. “I am here now,” he answered firmly, and I knew better than to question him further. He did not like to be questioned, and when he did not want to talk, the worst course was to press him. Gradually, over time, he would give me enough information to work out the rest, but for now I noticed a few places where his fur had rubbed off and assumed he had been to tainted land. If that was true, he would almost certainly undergo another of his mad periods. I resolved to feed