Samiha's Song

by Mary Victoria

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked, staring at him in wonder.

  ‘A friend,’ he answered soberly, though there was a twinkle in his eye. ‘But the question we’re addressing at the moment is, who are you? Are you going to chase after smoke or light a fire? Destiny isn’t a given. You have a chance. Are you going to use it, or are you going to waste your time questioning the point of existence, and sighing after your lost love?’

  ‘Can’t I have a bit of what other people have before the end?’ she protested. ‘Can’t I fall in love, maybe build a house and plant some vines? Is that so terrible?’

  ‘You?’ he laughed. ‘You, a lawful, loyal concubine, curdling your shillee’s milk and tending your vegetable patch? Your man would never get his year’s worth. You’d wilt within a season.’

  She considered this. ‘Alright,’ she admitted, shamefaced. ‘It’s true, I would have made a terrible wife. Or not the kind he wanted, anyway. I suppose it’s just as well. This way he’ll never have to find out.’

  ‘Don’t write the whole thing off. That tree might yet bear fruit.’

  ‘Well, he’s gone,’ she hurried on. ‘And you’re right. You’re right about everything. Mad or not, I’ve allowed myself to go soft. I have to start acting like the Kion again.’ She squared her shoulders. ‘Maybe I just needed a bit of madness to help me. So, my prince, or whoever you are, I suppose it’s time for another adventure. I need to speak to Oren. How do we do this? You heard them back there. They won’t let me go.’

  ‘There’s my girl,’ murmured the green-eyed man, surveying her proudly. ‘I believe that all the help we need is coming up the path right now.’

  Samiha turned and looked back toward the arena, squint ing against the glare of sun shining through the easter n thickets. She picked out the lone figure of Pallas winding slowly up the branch toward them.

  5

  When the shaking of his body stopped, Tymon felt empty, as if the use of the Grafting power, or misuse of it, had hollowed out his very bones. He knelt for a long while on the floor of the room beside the unconscious Jedda. Now that the heat of the orah had drained away, he was chilled to the core. He wondered dully why drawing on the skewed energy of the pendant had been so easy for Wick and so shattering to him. Dawn broke outside; the light filtering through the window shutters increased. Ten minutes had passed, or perhaps a quarter of an hour, when he looked up to find his companion’s eyes fixed on him.

  Jedda’s right eye was half-closed, the skin on her temple rapidly turning purple. She attempted to raise her head, winced and rested it on the floor again, licking her lips a moment before she spoke.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ she croaked. ‘To the Lyla.’

  He knew immediately that she was right. The air-chariot was their only hope if they wished to escape the Governor’s men or do anything to help Laska. He nodded and shuffled over to where she lay, hooking an arm about her waist to raise her up. She managed to stand with some difficulty. They shuffled painstakingly down the corridor and stairs into the stale darkness of the tavern lobby. There was no trace of the innkeeper. To her relief the front door was bolted, not locked. Tymon pulled back the hardwood bar as quietly as he could, his teeth on edge with every scrape of the shaft, and together they slipped out of the building.

  Outside, the west-facing alley was full of shadows, damp and cold. Their footsteps resonated uncomfortably in the early morning silence. As they neared the garbage container at the corner they both heard a slight noise, a quiet tapping as if someone or something were knocking inside the covered chute that led down to the compost cloths beneath the city. Tymon gave Jedda’s arm a cautionary squeeze and they slowed their pace, squinting anxiously into the gloom. The noise could simply have been a rat. But to the young people’s exacerbated senses it sounded disquietingly like a signal. They hobbled as quickly as they could out of the side street and into the main thoroughfare. The sailors’ taverns were quiet now, empty of revelry. The clouds above the fissure blushed pink in the sunrise.

  Though the city was still plunged in sleep the air-harbour was already coming to life. The hardwood barrier that blocked the entrance had been pushed to one side and the cries of ship-hands rebounded against the walls of the fissure, accompanied by a hiss of ether. It seemed to Tymon to take an eternity for them to wind their way around the central quay to the long protruding dock where they had left the Lyla the day before. Even as they stepped onto the jetty, however, he could see that something was wrong. At the end of the dock, where the air-chariot should have sat in ugly glory, there was only empty space. The Lyla was gone. Reason told them it had been pushed, towed, or somehow winched away without the use of its engines. But it might as well have been spirited to another world as far as Tymon and Jedda were concerned. They sank down as one on an upturned crate and stared in dismay at the bare boards of the quay.

  ‘He did it,’ muttered Tymon. ‘The Governor. He must have confiscated it during the night.’

  ‘Or even while we were talking to him.’ Jedda shook her head disgustedly. ‘I wouldn’t put it past him.’

  ‘In any case we’re stuck,’ sighed the young man. ‘They’ve taken everything. Our one means of contacting the Freehold. Provisions. Winter clothes. Everything …’

  ‘I know. No food, no friends, no escape.’

  She shut her mouth with a snap. Tymon shivered. The blistered face of the Lantrian soldier hung in his mind’s eye. He could not imagine how he would begin to tell Samiha about it. He stood up; he had to do something, to fend off thought with action.

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ he said. ‘This is the first place they’ll look for us.’

  She nodded and submitted to being hoisted upright again. They had hardly taken three steps, however, before the boards beneath their feet quivered with a warning tremor. Tymon looked up to see figures arriving on the far end of the dock, where it joined the central round. His heart quailed as he counted no less than a dozen soldiers jogging onto the jetty. Even if he had been willing or able to draw on the power of the orah once more, he could not have taken on twelve people. One man at the front of the group caught sight of them and gave a faraway shout. The figures began to run, causing the planks of the dock to tremble.

  ‘This is it.’ Jedda glanced around at Tymon, her expression strangely peaceful. ‘Glad to have met you. Sorry it had to be so short.’

  ‘I’m sorry, too,’ he mumbled. ‘I wish it had gone differently. I wish we’d tried—’

  He was going to say, ‘I wish we’d tried to contact the Oracle last night, like you suggested,’ but was interrupted by the sound of another voice.

  ‘Syon! Syon o sav!’ The words hissed out from close by. He could not pinpoint their source.

  ‘There!’ Jedda nudged him excitedly, pointing at the space between two crates.

  He smelt the familiar burning odour before he saw the figure swathed in black, peering over the lip of a trapdoor in the floor of the dock. It was immediately recognisable. The spy from the market! The figure pushed back its hood to reveal the blanched features of a Nurian youth, his hair so light as to be almost white.

  ‘Quick, Syon! he exclaimed, using the condensed ‘twig-tongue’ of the colonies. He motioned them to the trapdoor. ‘Inside, do not wait!’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ cried Jedda, tugging on Tymon’s hand as he hesitated. ‘We have no choice. They’re the only friends we’ve got.’

  Friends, in Tymon’s view, did not spy on one another. He did not care if the youth called him by his Nurian name: he did not feel anything like a Sign of the Sap at that moment. But there was no time to argue the point. Trembling with haste, he helped Jedda through the trapdoor and into the arms of a second person waiting beneath, a figure as thickly draped in black as the first had been. The peculiar burning smell clung to them both. The one who supported Jedda — man or woman, it was impossible to tell under the long, enfolding black cloak — stood balanced amid a series of ropes that stretched under the docks. A
web of cables hung along the underside of the jetties, extending all the way to the compost cloths beneath the main quay. Some of the ropes were tied at waist level to provide handholds, but Tymon’s stomach still lurched as he lowered himself onto the creaking net. The depths of the fissure yawned between his legs, a jagged abyss of broken spikes.

  The newcomers appeared completely at ease on their flimsy scaffold. Jedda’s assistant moved aside to make room for him while the white-haired youth stood balanced on the joists immediately beneath the dock. As soon as Tymon passed through the trapdoor, he slammed it shut and jammed a long bar through the handle, wedging it under one of the joists. The planks overhead shuddered as the Lantrians reached the hatch and pounded on it, cursing in their own language.

  ‘How’s this going to work?’ gasped Tymon, as his white-haired companion dropped nimbly onto the ropes.

  It was all he could do to hold on, to keep from falling: he knew that it would take him far too long to inch his way to safety on this precarious road. Even if the trapdoor held, the soldiers had only to fetch crossbows and pick him off with bolts from under the edge of the dock.

  ‘Syon use fly-rope.’ The youth smiled at him before flipping the hood back up over his head.

  ‘Fly-rope?’ repeated Tymon dazedly.

  He stared as Jedda’s helper clipped a hardwood hook over a cable that descended between the pillars supporting the dock. A cord was attached to the hook, and the hooded Nurian looped the cable under Jedda’s legs several times like a sling. He, or she, wrapped an arm about the girl from behind and simply jumped with her into the void, guiding the hook with a free hand. Tymon gawped at the pair as they plummeted into emptiness. They slid down the rope between the pillars until they were lost among the compost cloths.

  ‘Now you.’ The white-haired boy held out another hook to him attached to a similar cord.

  ‘Me?’ Tymon’s voice faltered. The horrors he had endured that morning did not in this particular instant compare with his fear of throwing himself into the abyss. Above them the planks of the trapdoor cracked under the soldiers’ repeated blows and the handle was slowly working loose under the pressure.

  ‘I help, Syon.’

  Without waiting for an answer, the youth looped the cord about Tymon’s chest and under his arms, clipping his hook onto the same descending rope.

  ‘Hold well,’ he commanded.

  Tymon found himself summarily thrust into emptiness, the weight of the other boy at his back. There was an instant of free-fall before the rope stretched taut on the hook above, causing the looped cord to dig painfully into Tymon’s armpits and constrict his ribs. He laboured to breathe as the wind rushed past his ears, and pulled himself upwards as best he could to relieve the pressure on his chest. They slid on, careening between the pillars of the dock before arriving with a bump on a small gallery under the shadow of the compost cloths. The Nurian boy jumped neatly to one side as they made contact with the platform, unclipping his hook. Tymon fell to his knees, winded, then gagged as he regained his breath. The stench beneath the cloths was overpowering. This was clearly the source of the odour that clung to his saviours: the sharp, pervasive reek of rotting garbage. Although the weather was cold, flies rose in clouds from the swollen cloths, cutting lazy shapes in the air above Tymon’s head.

  A quick glance showed him that they had arrived inside a system of maintenance platforms suspended on cables between the cloths. The two Nurians led them on without pause along the creaking walkways, skirting the garbage. He glimpsed ladders stretching up at intervals toward the wide beams above. Beyond that roof, he knew, lay the sunlit levels of Cherk Harbour — the streets, buildings, market stalls and warehouses — all supported by colossal struts planted in the floor of the fissure. The sounds of the city filtered down from above, a dim uproar of life and industry. But the precinct that met their eyes as they emerged from the walkways was a different world entirely. It was a city within a city.

  Here in the shadowy depths of the fissure the Nurians of Cherk Harbour had found sanctuary. Here they escaped the threat of ‘resettlement', the one-way ticket to Lantria aboard a slave ship. A slum clung to the back wall of the cleft like a stain. Plunged in gloom and saturated by the reek of refuse, the shacks were miserably poor, more squalid even than the tent-town in Marak and cobbled together from materials gleaned from the rubbish heaps. Tymon saw houses made out of broken ship containers and cannibalised food crates, old sections of hull and sailcloth, roofed with shards of bark and accessible only by ‘fly-rope'. He was obliged to face another heart-stopping descent, sliding down a cable from one of the galleries to a rickety balcony. This time he caught himself heavily on the ledge and bruised his shins.

  His guides continued up one of the many rope ladders between the buildings and would not allow him to pause. They tied a cord-sling about Jedda, pulling her up behind them. Tymon was afforded no such luxury and had to climb the ladder unaided. Dirty-white faces peeped out of the windows and doorways as he passed; naked urchins hung eagerly over railings to stare at him, scratching the omnipresent flies from their mouths. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. The natives of Cherk Harbour — those under the age of ten, in any case — looked like pot-bellied, flyblown little ghosts.

  Whether as a result of living in perpetual twilight or through some effect of poverty and starvation, the slum-dwellers were whiter than any Nurians he had seen before, their skin pale to the point of being livid. Jedda seemed positively ruddy-cheeked beside them. Most of the children had hair the colour of snow, mitigated by dirt. Their eyes behind encrusted sores were the feral, hungry blue of birds of prey. He could not tell whether the adults shared this colouring, for the few taller figures in the hovels were as hooded and shrouded as his guides.

  At last, they reached the top of the ladder. Tymon stumbled after his companions into one of the larger shacks in the slum, its walls constructed from salvaged sections of dirigible hull, and came to a halt, checked for a moment by the deeper gloom within. As his eyes adjusted he saw that the long room was full of people. Nurian youths, both male and female, sat packed against the walls, hoods thrown back and eyes glinting in the darkness. There was only a small space available in the centre of the floor. Tymon’s two companions took their places among the throng, divesting themselves of their hoods. He noticed that the one who had assisted Jedda was indeed a woman, her hair a cloud of feathery white about a pale face. The youths ranged in age from about eleven or twelve to a year or two older than Tymon. There were no older people present. More Nurians pressed through the door behind him until it seemed the room would burst. Naked children peered cautiously around the doorframe. The ghostly white slum-dwellers stared at Tymon in silence. They ignored Jedda, who sat in the central space on the floor with her head bowed. The stink of garbage and unwashed bodies was suffocating.

  He sat down beside Jedda. Although he was grateful to these people for helping him, they made him nervous. He felt as if he had entered a convention of mute, malodorous phantoms. The only item of furniture in the room was a ragged straw mat. On it sat a little girl, perhaps six years old. Unlike the other slum children, she wore an oversized black shift with the neck-hole slipping down one arm. A shiver ran down Tymon’s spine. He knew before she opened her mouth exactly who she was.

  ‘There is a man with a burnt face standing behind you,’ said the Oracle.

  Her voice had a quiet knowingness, the confidence of an adult. Her eyes, when she raised them, made him wish she had looked elsewhere, anywhere but at him. He did not glance behind him for he knew that no Lantrian soldier actually stood in the doorway. The Oracle Saw into his past. Nothing he had ever done in his life was hidden from that piercing gaze. Like Ash, she stared straight into his soul; except that where the fifth Focal had Seen and forgiven, even treated him with indulgence, the Oracle simply Saw. She neither forgave nor condemned. It was unbearable to Tymon.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ he blurted out. ‘I had to do it! He was going to hurt us
!’

  ‘So you hurt him first,’ stated the Oracle.

  ‘I didn’t want to harm the man,’ protested Tymon. ‘I just wanted to trick him into letting us go … I tried to do a Seeming … It may have gone wrong.’

  ‘Did it?’ The Oracle’s gaze was steady. ‘Did you not do exactly what you set out to do? You wanted to hurt the bully, didn’t you? Hurt the monster, as he had been hurting your friends?’

  Tymon writhed under that knowing stare. It was true. He had hated the Lantrian, after watching what he had done to Jedda: he had been glad to see the man suffer. It had been no mere Seeming. He had wanted the soldier to burn.

  ‘He would have done worse things, later … if I hadn’t stopped him …’

  He glanced at Jedda for corroboration on this, but his usually irrepressible companion was as silent as death. She cowered before the Oracle, pale and trembling, saying nothing whatever to relieve the pressure on Tymon. He frowned and with an angry motion ripped Wick’s pendant off his neck, intending to be rid of the troublesome orah once and for all. It was too great a responsibility. But to his dismay he found that the rod had somehow become stuck to his own medallion, the precious carved keepsake given him by Samiha. The two were fused together, inseparable, as if the heat flowing through him that morning had combined the orah within them. He struggled a moment to prise them apart then gave up in despair, throwing both on the mat at the Oracle’s feet.

  ‘There,’ he said curtly. ‘Everything that happened, happened because of that thing. Please take it, cure it, do whatever you like with it. I don’t want it any more.’

  As the bright rod clinked and rolled over the floor, he heard the collective intake of breath from the youths in the shack. The Nurians gazed hungrily at the orah. ‘Maza Sav!’ exclaimed the girl with cloudy hair. Her words were taken up by the others and an elated murmur ran through the room. ‘Maza Sav!’

  The Oracle, however, made no move to pick up the pendants and the rod of orah remained gleaming on the mat. ‘You.’ She swivelled her gaze to Jedda. ‘You encouraged him to use this for personal ends.’