Samiha's Song

by Mary Victoria

  ‘Don’t lose track of plan,’ cautioned Pallas. ‘We should watch warehouse this afternoon —’

  ‘The warehouse is useless,’ interrupted Tymon, pacing the floor of the tent. ‘We have to get Samiha out another way. We have to get them all out —’

  Pallas shook his head. ‘Too risky. We cannot help everyone, only Kion.’ Nell’s face, which had lit up at Tymon’s grand pronouncement, fell again at this matter-of-fact assessment. ‘Stick to plan: air-chariot on day of execution. That is possible.’

  ‘It was once, but it isn’t now,’ Tymon argued. ‘The Dean knows our plans. The air-chariot is a trap. We have to stay away from it.’

  ‘A trap?’ objected Pallas. ‘How can he know our minds? They arrest Bolas at home, not on quays. I do not think he gives in to torture.’

  ‘Torture?’ Nell blurted out, the blood draining from her cheeks. ‘Oh my poor Bolas!’

  ‘The Fathers have other ways of finding out what they want,’ Tymon assured her. He turned to Pallas, who was frowning as if he did not quite understand. ‘They’ve got the orah-clock, remember?’ he said. ‘They must have predicted what we were going to do as soon as they knew we were in the city. We have to find another way of helping Samiha.’

  ‘Orah-clock?’ muttered the Nurian youth blankly.

  ‘I’ve told you, the Dean has an Explorer artefact.’ Tymon eyed his friend in consternation: this was the third time Pallas had expressed his doubts about matters related to the Grafting that day, as if he no longer believed in it. The other youth’s face was serious, earnest in its bewilderment.

  ‘Explorers?’ asked Nell. ‘Are you talking about Grafting legends, Tymon? What’s that got to do with Bolas?’

  ‘Not the legends, the — the practice,’ stammered Tymon. He glanced away from Pallas’ continuing, incomprehensible puzzlement, and appealed to Jocaste, hovering in the door of the tent. ‘You know what I mean, Jocaste. The same force your father used can be harnessed to predict and control future events, or read other peoples’ thoughts. That’s what the Dean does. He and his cronies have a device that meddles with the Sap.’

  He had not discussed the Grafting with Jocaste in any depth before, wary of opening old wounds. He now regretted the decision; it seemed that no one in the tent properly understood what he was talking about. The Jay girl seemed reluctant to even mention the subject.

  ‘My father always said the priests meddled with evil forces,’ she answered slowly. ‘I suppose you could be right.’

  ‘The Sap?’ Pallas broke in, as if waking from a dream. ‘You say Dean knows of our plans through sorcery?’

  ‘Well, yes: what else?’ said Tymon with mounting annoyance. ‘Honestly, this isn’t funny or useful. Stop trying to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘I am not one pretending,’ retorted Pallas, an edge of anger in his voice. ‘I think worry has made your imagination strong, friend. You speak of magic, children’s stories, when people are in real trouble.’

  ‘Children’s stories?’ echoed Tymon in shock. ‘Pallas, what’s got into you? You of all people should remember what the Envoy did to Kosta, and Oren saving the village from the pirates, and for heaven’s sake, the Doctor’s chair …’

  He choked on the words and fell silent, staring at Pallas, whose expression mirrored his own disappointment and incredulity. The girls looked from one to the other, ill at ease. The deck boards shifted beneath Tymon’s feet as he recalled his own moment of disorientation in the Temple and the fact that he had never pinpointed where Lace was during the trial. There had been another, more subtle attack waged against them, and it had not been directed at him.

  ‘You don’t remember any of it, do you,’ he whispered, horrified. ‘Everything to do with the Grafting. The Envoy’s wiped it out.’

  The blow was a devastating one. The level of power necessary to destroy or block memories was far beyond Tymon; he was barely able to force others to see or say certain things, as Jedda and Wick were able to do. He had no means of restoring Pallas’ mind.

  ‘I think,’ his friend noted briskly, ‘you are tired. I think you would benefit from walk outside. We will go watch warehouse, fresh air does good.’

  ‘You can’t go,’ said Tymon. His pulse hammered and he felt as if he could not breathe. ‘Don’t go after the machine,’ he pleaded. ‘It’s a trap. They’ll be waiting for you —’

  ‘It is not trap unless friend Bolas talks.’ Pallas gazed questioningly at Nell, still sitting hunched on the mattress. The girl shook her head in mute dejection. ‘Then this is our chance,’ declared the Nurian. ‘If you not wish to come then stay, Argosi. I must go or fail Kion.’

  ‘You’ll fail her if you do go!’ cried Tymon. Pallas was not even calling him ‘Syon’ any longer, he thought. ‘Please, help me find a way to speak with Samiha tonight. I just want to talk to her. She’ll set all this to rest.’ Somehow, he was sure no sorcerer’s trick would get the better of the Kion.

  ‘This is foolishness,’ barked Pallas in frustration. ‘You break into dungeons just to talk? You enter snakes’ nest for no reason!’

  ‘Begging your pardon, but the heretic isn’t in the dungeons,’ said Nell. She smiled nervously as everyone turned to stare at her. ‘They didn’t keep her there for long, actually. The Chief Inquisitor refused, nobody said why.’

  ‘Now she tells us!’ Tymon exclaimed, before quelling his impatience. ‘I’m sorry, Nell. I don’t mean to snap. Where’s the Kion now?’

  The blood had rushed back into Nell’s face at his outburst. She drew herself up with quiet dignity. ‘I think they moved her to the bell-tower,’ she said. ‘The food went there this morning, that’s how I know. There’s a room under the bells where the Fathers pull the ropes. I’ve been there to clean.’

  ‘So. She isn’t under the seminary. She’s above it. We still have to find a way get there,’ muttered Tymon.

  There was an awkward pause. A warning whistle sounded three blasts from the striped pavilion, a signal that the Jays’ performance was about to begin. Jocaste stirred anxiously in the doorway. But it was Pallas who spoke, low and angry.

  ‘You take needless risk,’ he said to Tymon. ‘Never I think this time will come but I regret bringing you from Farhang.’

  Tymon gazed at him sadly. ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, my friend. I have to speak to Samiha. If you were wise, you’d come with me.’

  ‘Do as you will.’ Pallas gave a furious shrug. ‘We meet in Jay pavilion at eighth hour. If not, I get Lyla myself.’

  He turned to leave in a huff. On impulse, Tymon clutched at his sleeve as he strode through the door. ‘Pallas, don’t you remember how we found where the machine was, in the first place?’ he entreated. ‘Try to think. I had vision in the Doctor’s pavilion. I Saw the machine in the warehouse. Remember?’

  The barest furrow appeared on his friend’s brow as he considered this.

  ‘We only know where it is because of the Grafting,’ continued Tymon. ‘I’m not lying, I swear—’

  ‘Spy reports,’ mumbled the scout. ‘We hear by bird, from Marak …’

  And without another word, he wrenched his arm free and marched out of the tent. Tymon stood stock-still, staring after him. The memories were not just gone: new ones had been invented to take their place. Pallas might as well have spat in his face.

  ‘Don’t take it so badly,’ advised Nell, joining him by the door. Her annoyance had ebbed away and she tentatively squeezed his hand. ‘Everybody’s under a lot of strain. He just needs to cool down.’

  Jocaste remained in the doorway though her cue had long passed. ‘It’s my first time in town since I was a baby,’ she remarked to Nell. ‘Is the belltower the tall thin building we see poking up behind the temple?’

  The Argosian girl nodded. ‘Hardly anyone goes up there,’ she admitted, a little shamefaced. ‘I can’t imagine what it’s like for the poor creature. No windows, no sunlight. The Fathers don’t visit her. It’s like she’s contagious. T
hey push food through a trapdoor. You may have noticed no one’s rung the call to prayer lately, Tymon.’

  The young man lifted his head, blinking at her. Through his shock and distress at Pallas’ behaviour he grasped what Nell was saying. He had grown used to the pervasive silence or human call to worship of the Eastern Canopy, and realised the seminary bells had been uncharacteristically mute since their arrival in the city. But the description of the room in the tower reminded him of something else, something he had heard long ago.

  ‘A high place without windows,’ he breathed in amazement, recalling Samiha’s dream on the Freehold. Had she Seen her own imprisonment, after all?

  ‘In which case, I may know how to help you,’ added Jocaste. ‘But I really do have to go now. Meet me at the props shed in about an hour, Tymon. You’ll be able to talk to your Kion, I think, if talking’s all you want to do.’

  With this mysterious announcement she was gone, hurrying out of the tent. Nell turned to Tymon without a trace of her former coquetry.

  ‘Will he make it?’ she asked quietly. ‘My Bolas. Will he come back to me?’

  ‘I don’t know if any of us are going to make it,’ Tymon answered with a rueful smile. ‘But I do know one thing. I’m not done here. And I’ll be damned if I’ve said my last word about Bolas.’

  After bidding a sober farewell to Nell, he made his way to the shed at the rear of the circus pavilion. Bursts of music rose up from the striped round of the tent, punctuated by uproarious clapping for a good crowd had turned out for the Jays’ afternoon performance. He sat down by the door of the prop store to wait for Jocaste. The shock of Pallas’ disaffection had drained away, leaving him strangely calm. The blow was terrible, worse than a death, but he would carry on. He would think of another way to help Samiha. He had the sense that by talking to her, he would find the solution that escaped him. Perhaps the priests would have him arrested now that he had fulfilled his pawn’s role; it did not matter. He would go on for as long as he could, and when his time came, he would be done. He made a hasty meal of the remains of the Jays’ breakfast as he waited by the shed, conscious of the need to keep up his strength.

  The better part of an hour passed before Jocaste and Anise emerged from a flap at the back of the pavilion, followed by a gust of applause. The Jay girl was leaning and laughing on her partner’s arm, dressed in feathers from top to toe. There were feathers on her chest and feathers draped over her arms and back. The feathered crest rose up once more on her head like a crown. She seemed beautiful to Tymon, the scar on her face no longer defining her.

  ‘It’s packed in there,’ she announced, merrily, as she caught sight of him. ‘I wish you could stay and watch us, Tymon. Never mind. There’s a visible show and an invisible one. Let’s get yours started.’

  Jocaste’s idea had the virtue of utter simplicity. The Jays employed small floating platforms as mobile scaffolds, modified versions of the ether-powered barges farmers used to harvest their crops. The tiny craft was equipped with two small ether sacks lashed to each side, and could carry only a single person, which made it useless as a means of escape. It could bring Tymon to Samiha but not remove her from the tower. The scaffold was difficult to manoeuvre, being meant for vertical movement, and notoriously unstable. But these failings might play to his advantage. He could carry the little craft unobtrusively through the city, and launch it near the rising slope of the branch behind the Priest’s Quarter. If he waited till dusk, he would be practically invisible among the rooftops, a grey mote against the upper regions of the limb where it turned almost vertical behind the seminary buildings. He would be able to work his way along the slope toward the temple buttress and the bell-tower. Once there, he still needed to figure out a way of alerting Samiha to his presence.

  Before even considering such problems, however, he would have to learn to navigate the shaky vessel. This proved to be a delicate art. The Jays showed him how to send the little scaffold upwards with a squirt of ether from the hand-held pump, balancing nimbly on the platform, and taught him to release the exhaust nozzles simultaneously in order to descend without flipping the craft. His initial efforts met with dismal failure but he persevered. Anise warned him that it would take at least an hour or two to accustom himself to the movement.

  Their lesson was cut short by another thunderous burst of applause from the pavilion; the two acrobats were needed in the next act. But Tymon refused to let Jocaste leave the shed until she had accepted Gord’s money on behalf of the troupe. He did not want to be weighed down with it, he said; it was a paltry enough return for all their help. Embracing him warmly, the Jays wished him the best of luck in his endeavour and left him to confront the stubborn scaffold on his own.

  After countless attempts, he was finally able to take the craft up to the roof of the shed and bring it down again without incident. Anise had been conservative in his estimate, for the sun was sinking toward the western leaf-line when Tymon quit the circus barge, the scaffold wrapped in canvas under his arm. Its sacks were deflated and a replacement flask of ether hung at his belt. He quashed a desire to continue up the long arc of the air-harbour to find Pallas, and passed straight through the city gates, bound for the upper terraces. The festival crowds had only multiplied with the approach of evening and he fought against a stream of people moving in the opposite direction. There were still a few witnesses on the sidelines, stumbling bloody and dull-eyed through the streets, but they had lost their audience. Most of the townsfolk were headed to the docks for a night of pleasure.

  Tymon had decided to conduct his aerial manoeuvre in an alley under the south flank of the seminary, overlooked by the very dormitories he had slept in as a child. No student with a shred of self-respect would be in the dorms that evening. He arrived to find the neighbourhood as undisturbed as he had hoped, the narrow buildings on either side shuttered and dark. He secured his scaffold to the foot of the seminary wall, then carefully released the volatile contents of the flask into the sacks and stepped onto the quivering contraption. It rocked drunkenly under his weight before stabilising.

  When he felt confident enough to do so, he unhooked the moorings and allowed the platform to float up in dreamlike silence over the rooftops of the city, grey and jagged in the swift winter’s dusk. Sounds of revelry carried up from the twinkling crescent of the air-harbour. He drifted past unlit dormitory windows, crooked chimney pots and empty pigeon roosts, coming up short against the wall of bark behind the seminary where the supporting branch turned almost vertical. Leaning into the branch for stability, he thrust himself steadily to the right, toward the black hump of the Temple buttress extending from the wall. The exercise took longer than he had imagined and a cold breeze hit him between the shoulder blades, chilling his neck. After an age of pushing against the bark with raw fingers, he reached the base of the bell-tower and floated up the side of the forbidding construction, until he was just opposite the arched enclave that housed the bells.

  The massive bells would have deafened anyone sounding them from immediately beneath. In order to create a protective barrier for the priests pulling the ropes, the cables hung through slots into a sealed chamber just under the floor of the enclave. It was here that Samiha was imprisoned, shut away at the summit of the tower. Tymon caught hold of one of the arches to halt the craft and eased himself gingerly onto the floor of the enclave, looping his mooring rope about a pillar. The city lights glittered in a wide skirt at the base of the tower, giddily distant. Above him, the domed forms of the bells hung silent, trailing ropes like thick entrails. There was a heavy hardwood trapdoor in one corner of the enclave floor but it was firmly locked from the inside. Only one other opening led into the hidden room below. Tymon knelt down, inspecting the narrow aperture through which the ropes disappeared.

  ‘Samiha?’ he called softly through the gap. His breath was just visible, smoking the air.

  That same afternoon, Jedda had climbed the winding staircase inside the bell-tower, bound for the room at th
e summit. The sealed, windowless stairwell had seemed to her to be a cylindrical tomb like those the ancients used to confine their dead, forever suffocating them inside the Tree. She could have sworn there were more steps to the top of the building than were warranted by its size. She was panting by the time she reached the landing below Samiha’s room, and paused to catch her breath before mounting the ladder to the trapdoor.

  Jedda had always had the dim sense, born of her own disappointments, of being the butt of some mystic joke or mockery of cosmic proportions. The feeling curdled in her stomach as she wrestled her key into the padlock securing the trapdoor. Earlier that day, she had used her powers on the captain of the guard to secure that key, and was not sure her attempts had gone undetected by her master. She had little time to lose. She burst through the trapdoor and into her native tongue without preamble.

  ‘I’ve come to free you, Kion.’

  The woman sitting at the table did not glance up at her deliverer. Samiha had been writing by the light of a flickering candle; there was a thick sheaf of papers at her elbow, the pages covered in close, neat characters. Her reed pen scratched over the current sheet without pause. She ignored Jedda completely.

  ‘I know you’re angry with me, and you have every right to be, but I swear on my life this isn’t a trick,’ continued Jedda. ‘We haven’t got much time. Please, your Highness. Come with me.’

  But Samiha did not stir from her chair. Only her hand moved across the page, her bony shoulder jerking beneath the white shift as she wrote. The pen shrieked over the paper made of mashed leaf-pulp quickly, too quickly. Jedda’s heart began to thump against her ribs as she moved closer to peer into Samiha’s face. The Kion’s expression was preternaturally still. She wrote at an extraordinary pace, the pen bleeding words across the page. When Jedda bent over her, fascinated, Samiha suddenly looked up.

  ‘Jedhartha Aditi,’ she pronounced without emotion.