‘You can say that again,’ she replied in a fierce murmur. ‘Listen, Tymon, when we find Laska I’m done. I’ll help you, then I’m calling it quits. I’d rather study with a venomous snake than — than that thing.’
She glanced over her shoulder at their prospective teacher. The Oracle’s head was bowed to her chest. She had eaten her fill of the porridge and had remained slumped in the same position, staring downwards and not uttering a word, for about half an hour.
‘I wonder,’ continued Tymon, pushing his own bowl away with a sigh, ‘was she always like this? Or was she different in years gone by? Is it possible she’s no longer a proper Grafter, or that she’s gone mad?’
‘Anything’s possible.’ Jedda gave a grunt of dismissal.
‘In that case,’ he reflected thoughtfully, ‘I’m surprised Oren didn’t say anything about it in his letter. Aren’t full Grafters supposed to be in touch with each other through the Sap, or something?’
‘Oren doesn’t know everything,’ observed Jedda with the barest hint of a sneer. ‘I expect she wasn’t like this when he trained with her. Or maybe she was and it didn’t bother him.’
‘Oren studied here?’ asked Tymon in surprise, the revelation unsettlling his certainties. ‘I thought he trained with the Focals in Marak?’
‘Both.’ She shrugged. ‘Everyone comes to the Oracle at some point. So they say. But they don’t say she’s a monster. Maybe they’re too embarrassed.’
‘We haven’t been properly introduced,’ said the monster, looking up at them.
It was the first time she had spoken since their altercation outside. There was an uncomfortable pause, broken only by the crackle and hiss of flames. The two young people exchanged glances. The Oracle rose and pattered across the hall to sit beside them. They had no choice but to make room for her by the fire.
‘You, young man. What is your name?’ she demanded.
‘Tymon. Tymon of Argos. In—’ He had been about to say in the beauty, but his voice trailed off.
‘Argos city was once the pride of the West,’ said the Oracle. ‘As Nur city was of the East. The two have more in common than most people know.’
She turned to her second student and waited pointedly.
‘I’m Jedda,’ answered the girl, after a grudging pause. ‘I’m from nowhere special. My parents died in a pirate raid in the South Fringes. I was brought up by my uncle. We moved to Marak a month ago. It didn’t help us.’
‘Is that so?’ mused the Oracle, gazing serenely at Jedda.
There was a further, awkward hiatus, in which Jedda shrank away from the Oracle and scowled at the floor.
‘People generally think that in order to become a Grafter you must have the Sight,’ remarked their teacher, at last. ‘Nothing could be farther from the truth. I’m not interested in your ability to predict the future. It’s the least important aspect of our art. I want to know whether you have other talents. I want to know whether either of you have the capacity to listen.’
‘That depends on what people say,’ muttered Jedda, sulkily. ‘And whether it’s worth listening to.’
The Oracle gave her a level stare. ‘To study you must be able to admit you don’t know everything,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem ready to do that, either of you.’
Tymon nudged Jedda. ‘We’re trying our best,’ he put in, summoning up all the diplomacy he could muster. ‘A lot of things happened today. It hasn’t been easy. But we want to help our friend.’
‘I believe you do,’ replied the Oracle, after a moment. ‘Well, we’ll soon see what you’re made of. The Reading never lies.’
‘The Reading?’
‘A guided trance.’ She smiled brightly. ‘The first step of a Grafter’s journey. You will See a vision of the one you seek. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Come closer, both of you, on either side of me.’
They formed a tight circle by the fire. She offered them each one of her little hands, indicating they should do the same to complete the ring. She seemed suddenly genial, ready to help. Tymon took the proffered hand warily. He mistrusted this abrupt change of heart.
‘Breathe deep,’ she directed. ‘Close your eyes. Be still. Think about the person you wish to find.’
Tymon screwed his eyelids shut. Slow minutes passed. He had been afraid the Grafter’s trance would be like this, an exercise in self-control. Since he had been told to sit still, his one desire was to move about — to dance, to shout, anything to break the spell. After a while the Oracle began to chant softly in Nurian. Tymon recognised the cadences of the Grafter’s song. In weakness find strength; in emptiness, power. The familiar phrases echoed through his mind, a distant comfort. But when her voice faded away, nothing had changed. He felt as he used to in the hours of enforced prayer and meditation at the seminary: his mind wandered and he fidgeted. The wind rose outside, rattling the planks of the door. He was at first too cold in the draughty hall then uncomfortably warm as the fire grew hotter. The flames were a crackling, insistent presence beyond his eyelids. A thousand fears and hopes jostled through his brain. When would the trance start? What would it be like? Was he capable of experiencing it at all?
‘Focus your thoughts,’ said the Oracle. Her voice sounded as if it came from somewhere very close to his right ear and he had to fight the instinct to open his eyes, to make sure she was sitting where she had been. ‘Picture your friend. Imagine what he would look like if he were here. Remember how he dressed.’
Tymon tried with all his might to conjure up Laska’s image. He recalled every detail of his friend’s expression and appearance, his kind face worn and bleached and grizzled as an old dock-bird.
‘Good,’ whispered the Oracle.
This time, her voice rasped in his left ear. He could not help it. His eyes blinked open. The mine hall was darker, plunged in shifting shadows. The fire, fallen low, glowed red and hot at its centre. He felt a stab of disappointment.
‘It didn’t work,’ he said, turning to the Oracle.
The little girl was gone. There was a stranger sitting beside him.
He jumped up with a cry of surprise, staring at the woman who squatted on her heels, quiet and serene beside the fire. She was middle aged, her handsome brown face lined with fatigue. Her long hair was streaked with white. Of the child, Lai, there was no sign. Jedda had also disappeared, swallowed up in the darkness. He thought of the tunnel mouths in the recesses of the hall with distaste. Had they not been closed off after all? Had this person been hiding there all along, watching them?
‘Who are you?’ he blurted out. ‘Where are my friends?’
The woman rose to her feet. She was wearing a grey dress that shimmered when she moved as if it contained points of light.
‘Don’t you recognise me?’ she said.
‘No.’ He squinted at her in bewilderment and increasing fear. ‘This isn’t funny. Where’s the Oracle?’
The darkness of the hall, he realised with a shiver, was not empty. He glanced anxiously over his shoulder. Something was moving just beyond the circle of firelight. He heard a rasping, slithering noise, a click and a tap like claws on bark. His heart began to beat uncomfortably against his ribs.
‘Look at me,’ commanded the woman. ‘Don’t let yourself be distracted.’
He found that he could not refuse her. His gaze was dragged back to her face against his will and he frowned at her, wondering who she was and why she had such power over him. Her eyes, he saw, were blue, not brown: a dark, piercing, uncanny blue. The eyes of the Oracle had been that colour, he remembered.
‘It’s you,’ he breathed with belated understanding.
The trance had already begun. This was the Reading: he was experiencing it separately from Jedda. He had assumed that he would share the vision with his fellow student. Nothing was less likely, he realised.
‘Yes,’ replied the older version of the Oracle. ‘It’s me. And you, young man, are afraid of the dark. We shall have to remedy that.’
‘Som
ething’s out there,’ he muttered.
He peered nervously into the murky shadows. If this was the world of the Grafter’s trance then he did not like it in the least. He had expected to enjoy the bright, subtle play of the Sap, to experience again the sense of certainty and purpose which had been briefly his during the vision on board the Envoy’s ship. Instead, the Reading was all darkness and confusion. The space he was in did not even resemble the mine hall any longer, being more spherical and perfectly formed, carved with smooth exactitude into the bark. He was in a domed chamber without entrance or exit. The blocked tunnels and the draughty door had vanished. The fire remained, a glowing bed of coals, but the upturned cart had disappeared. The darkness was alive with rasping movement. Long, sinuous forms darted just on the edge of Tymon’s vision, just beyond the circle of firelight.
‘What are those things?’ he asked the Oracle suspiciously.
‘Don’t worry about them. We’re interested in what’s going on inside, not outside.’
She stepped up to him, scrutinising his face, as if she were seeing him for the first time. ‘A bit wild and overgrown, aren’t you?’ she remarked. ‘I should have been allowed to teach you years ago. You’re running rampant.’
‘Excuse me?’ he asked, nonplussed.
The Oracle was, if possible, more troubling in her adult form than she had been as a child. Her eyes not only stripped his soul bare, but looked beyond it, past it, to something else. She was gazing at him in that way now, appraising him critically from head to toe.
‘Your growth.’ She rapped him smartly on the chest with her index finger. ‘It hasn’t been pruned at all. You’re all over the place.’
He was opening his mouth to protest that he had no idea what she meant when he felt an itching sensation over his heart, where she had touched him. The itch became a burning pain and he ripped open the buttons of his tunic, surveying his chest in shock. There was a lump under the skin, a budding cyst. Had he caught the Slow Death after all? But this was a dream, he reminded himself, a vision. Besides, there was nothing slow about the growth on his chest. It pushed outwards at an alarming rate, coming to a point even as he watched. He gasped as the tip broke through his skin. The lump beneath was the bright, light colour of new vegetation.
‘What’s going on? What have you done to me?’ he cried in horror, retreating from the Oracle.
‘Me? Nothing,’ she said. But there was a twitch of satisfaction at the corner of her mouth. ‘They’ve always been there. You just never Saw.’
‘They?’ he echoed, aghast.
And felt the burning points on his back, legs, stomach, in answer. He cried out with pain and terror, reeling backwards as the bright shoots erupted from his body in swift succession, ripping through his breeches and tunic. The first growth on his chest had produced a delicate spray of leaves. He tried to pull it off but it was firmly attached, sprouting out of him.
‘Get them off me!’ he shouted. This isn’t real, he reminded himself desperately. This is a dream.
He was no longer able to walk: roots had germinated from the soles of his feet and burrowed down into the floor. The tendrils on his upper body had become thick and strong, full of budding leaves. They were warm to the touch and filled with an inner, pulsing light.
‘Make it stop!’ he pleaded with the Oracle, hoarsely.
‘This is the Tree of Being, Tymon. It doesn’t stop.’ Her appearance had changed again; she was ancient now, a white-haired crone, decrepit and exceedingly ugly. She flashed a toothless grin. ‘The day it stops is the day you die,’ she cackled.
Tymon threw up his arms to fend off the questing branches, and found his arms locked in an outspread position. Stems erupted from his wrists: delicate, glowing leaves trembled at his fingers. He could not move. A moan of fear escaped his lips.
‘Don’t fight it,’ advised the crone, more kindly. ‘The Tree touches everyone but only a few are able to See. Accept the gift. Be at one with the Sap.’
He did not feel at one with anything, but invaded by an outside force. The branches above his head scraped and rustled, reaching their tendrils up toward the domed ceiling. Other branches curled out to meet them. The chamber was overtaken with vegetation. Green boughs snaked up the circular walls and sprays of bright leaves infested the ceiling, rustling and slithering against each other. Through them all, connecting them all, moved a common beat, a shared pulse of life. The branches that pierced Tymon’s flesh ran with a burning liquid. It swelled and throbbed within him like the beating of a drum.
‘Do you feel the Sap?’ demanded the Oracle. Her eyes were madly bright, bird-like. She reminded him of Amu Bibi.
‘I feel it,’ he gasped. ‘But why … why does it have to be like this? Last time it just flowed. There were no branches. It wasn’t hot.’
‘I don’t believe in coddling my students,’ she shrugged. ‘Right now, you’re Seeing a little of what I See, and feeling a fraction of what I feel. That might be hard for you, but then life is hard. You might as well get used to it.’
But her touch was gentle as she ran her hands over his branches, tracing their growth. He felt her caress through the Tree; the sensation contrasted oddly with his general state of discomfort. The leaves above his head quivered in response.
‘A questing mind and a refusal to blindly follow those gone before,’ she said, half-closing her eyes. ‘That’s good. Some temper and self-indulgence, but nothing that can’t be trimmed.’
She circled him and emerged on his other side as a young girl, lithe and light-fingered, a curtain of black hair falling about her face. She passed her hand down another of his branches, her eyes still closed.
‘This is not so good. Loyalty to the point of stubbornness. A tendency to be ruled by emotion. Do you think you know what’s best for your loved ones, Tymon? I assure you, you do not.’
He only groaned in answer. She was Reading him, of course. That was what the Oracle’s trance was all about — not Laska, not the future. He had been right to be wary of her. The last thing he wanted to hear at the moment was a dissection of his character. The Sap appeared to be agitated by the Oracle’s touch, the branches of the Tree throbbed with fire and every pulse sent a burning stab through Tymon.
‘What about Laska?’ he flung out. ‘You promised I’d See him.’ All this would be worth the effort, he told himself, if he could only help the captain.
‘You’ll have your vision,’ she murmured as she felt her way along his right arm. ‘Your friend is a part of you. His fate is connected with yours, bound up with your own. Aha, found you, my beauty.’ She extracted a single tendril from the tangle sprouting out of him and held it up. ‘All of them are twined with you, as a matter of fact,’ she said. ‘That’s what makes you so useful.’
‘All of who?’ huffed Tymon, wincing. And then bellowed out in pain.
The heat inside the branches had abruptly increased. The Sap had broken free of its channels. Fire spilled into him, over and through him. This time it was no mere display of lights, but a flaming torrent flowing from the crown of his head to the tip of his toes. The certainty that he was dreaming slipped away. The pain was too present, too persistent. His flesh as well as the wood of the Tree grew incandescent and the substance of both began to melt and break apart.
‘What’s happening to me?’ he choked.
‘Don’t fight the Sap, Tymon. It’ll take you where you need to go.’
There was no escape. What was left of his body, of his sense of self, was melting, engulfed in the Sap. It seemed to draw him toward the tendril in the Oracle’s hand. The blazing current pulled him apart until he surrendered. For an instant, there was only light. Then he was gone. All pain ceased.
Tymon came to himself to find that the world was utterly blind and dark. He was free to move but could see nothing in front of him. The familiar burning odour of the garbage sacks beneath Cherk Harbour stung his nostrils and he stumbled forward, waving his arms before his face. The floor was made up of loose obje
cts that slid treacherously under his feet.
‘Oracle?’ he called, more frantically than he had intended. ‘Where are you?’
‘Here,’ she answered. ‘Beside you. Where I’ve always been.’
As his eyes adjusted, he realised the space he was in was not entirely dark but lit by a faint, phosphorescent glow. There was no sign of the Tree of Being. The Oracle’s silhouette, the shifting lights of her dress became gradually visible beside him. She looked as she had when the trance had begun, a woman in her middle years. So this was still part of the Reading, he reasoned, taking a deep breath. He was intensely glad there were no longer any branches sprouting out of him, wherever else he might be.
‘You could have warned me it would get so dark,’ he mumbled.
‘I had no idea how “it would get”,’ noted the Oracle. ‘I guide the Reading, I don’t control it. This is the vision you requested.’
Gradually he began to distinguish the jumble of objects around him. Empty boxes, broken planks and rotten vegetables were all heaped up in an enclosed tent of sorts. He was in a garbage sack. The vision had brought him to one of the compost cloths beneath Cherk Harbour. It was night time. Far above the moon had risen over the fissure, sending a dim reflected light through the gaps in the cloth.
‘But why here?’ he asked. The stench almost made him vomit. The Grafter’s visions were correct in every detail. ‘I just wanted to find Laska!’
‘So you have, I believe,’ said the Oracle sadly, looking down.
Only then did Tymon see the face of his friend among the refuse, deathly pale in the moonlight. He threw himself down at Laska’s side with a cry. The captain was lying half-buried in rotting debris. His eyes were closed and he did not move. His head had been severely bludgeoned: his lips were caked with blood and his clothes torn. He had been beaten by the Governor’s men and pushed down a garbage chute to die. Tymon bent over him with a sick heart, listening a long, anxious moment for his breath.
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