‘These things happen, nami,’ observed Aidon. But his expression remained cool. Suspicion lingered.
They had no further opportunity to speak; at that moment another horn blasted out, a dissonant wail from the lookout post further up the side of the rift. Soon the reason for the signal became visible. Three medium-sized dirigibles were descending towards the base, flat-bottomed farmers’ barges used to transport goods around the Central Canopy. The overseers had arrived early at their appointment.
The men in charge of choosing workers for the plantations did not waste time in beginning their task. As the three vessels docked on the short jetty near the mouth of the rift, a division of soldiers arrived at the pilgrims’ enclosure to escort them to meet their new masters. The troops stationed at Hayman’s Point were a vicious crew, bristling with weapons Tymon had never seen, or even imagined possible, in Argos city. They had ordinary spears and crossbows, but also savage-looking spiked clubs at their belts and short whips equipped with barbs. This time they placed hardwood fetters on the prisoners’ ankles, so that the Nurians were obliged to walk in small, shuffling steps, one behind the other. Tymon was thrust along with the others into a tiny pen by the side of the dock. He and his fellows were pressed together like beasts at market.
From this holding area the pilgrims were released one by one. Their manacles were removed and they were paraded on the dock before the three Argosian overseers and the lieutenant of the base. The plantation men were evidently well used to their work. They insisted on inspecting the teeth of the workers, peered into the whites of their eyes and required their clothes to be removed so that they might note any sign of disease or deformity. They complained loudly to the lieutenant about the shoddy quality of the merchandise; they claimed that half their purchases died after a few months on the job, and that they were being delivered substandard goods. If a particular pilgrim was chosen by an overseer, he was immediately loaded onto one of the ships. If he did not pass muster, he was returned to the pen with the others, as inferior stock. No money exchanged hands: the plantation owners had all paid the seminary in advance, in Argos city, acquiring a licence for a certain number of workers.
Tymon hunched his shoulders as he waited in line for the inspection. He was hot with shame and anger at the behaviour of his countrymen, prickling with it even on the cold winter’s morning. It was doubly hard to be near the back of the queue and obliged to watch almost everyone else paraded onto the dock before him. Only Aidon, his brother and a few others remained standing with him as the inspection dragged on. The soldiers jeered at the workers while they stripped down in the freezing wind, jabbing at them with the hafts of their spears. Fury pulsed through Tymon’s veins, and Samiha’s orah-pendant, long forgotten under the collar of his tunic, glowed with an answering warmth.
‘Calm down,’ said the Oracle. ‘You’re right to be angry, but calm down. You’re only one. They are many.’
‘Why don’t they do something about it?’ he hissed to her. ‘Why don’t the pilgrims resist? They could take on those guards if they worked together.’
But he guessed, even as he breathed his frustration, at the many reasons why they did not resist: at their isolation, their loss of heart, their awareness of the long and impossible journey home. It was nearing his turn to exit the pen. The Oracle remained silent as a soldier stumped up to him, undid his fetters and propelled him onto the dock with a shove.
‘Off you go, traitor,’ he jeered at Tymon. ‘Time to get your just deserts. You’re no Argosian now.’
No Argosian now. The words sizzled through the air to fill a sudden and complete silence. Tymon caught a glimpse of Aidon’s expression as he stepped onto the dock, saw the hatred that closed down like a shutter over the youth’s face. He felt the collective gaze of the Nurians bore into his back. He no longer cared about the overseers murmuring to each other in surprise, eyeing him doubtfully. His just deserts were lying in wait behind him, in the pen. Death would find him if he returned to the pilgrims’ enclosure. Death would stalk him on any plantation where those workers shared his company. The sneering soldier had seen to that. He swallowed dryly.
‘What’s all this nonsense?’ asked one of the overseers, a burly man with an abundant beard, gesturing towards Tymon. ‘We do not pay to take on traitors. He should be executed in Argos city, not sent to us.’ His colleagues nodded in agreement.
‘He’s young and healthy,’ shrugged the lieutenant. ‘He’ll work well once he’s broken in, I assure you. It’s a shame to waste good muscle like this. He’s been well fed all his life, not like those poor scraps back there.’
He strode up to Tymon and yanked at the laces on his tunic. ‘Get your kit off, idiot,’ he snarled in the young man’s ear. ‘Save yourself, if you have an ounce of wit.’
Tymon stood like a lump on the dock. He could not take off his clothes. He was still too proud, too unused to such treatment, to bow down in the face of overwhelming odds. He did not move despite the Oracle’s warning not to be a fool. The lieutenant turned with a sigh to one of his hulking guards. The man barely needed prompting: he raised his barbed whip and advanced. There was no further alert, no chance for Tymon to reconsider his decision. The weight of the whip hit his left ear; the barbs raked across his cheek, sending a lightning-shock of pain through him. The strike made his head reel and he staggered sideways. The other soldiers on the dock burst into laughter.
‘The traitor can’t hear orders,’ one hooted. ‘He’s deaf.’
‘Open up his ears with the whip,’ howled another.
‘Take off your clothes, fool,’ rapped out the lieutenant. ‘Or suffer the consequences.’
Tymon did not respond. The blow to his head seemed to have rooted him to the dock. Even had he wanted to move, he would not have been able to do so now. A sticky trickle of blood ran down his left cheek, and he felt for a fleeting moment that he was back in the arena in Sheb, face to face with Caro. The lieutenant nodded to another one of his men, who strode forward and ripped the flimsy Jay tunic from Tymon’s back. Before he could open his mouth to protest, the second soldier had forced him to kneel beside a mooring post. The man secured Tymon’s hands about the short pillar with a belt, then glanced up in query at his superior officer.
‘Thirty-five,’ announced the lieutenant resignedly. He turned away.
‘Sav vay,’ the Oracle whispered, aghast, as the first guard lifted up his whip again.
‘One!’ barked out his colleague by the mooring post.
The soldier brought the whip down on Tymon’s back with a resounding crack. A breath of shock escaped the young man’s lips and tears leapt to his eyes. He blinked furiously and knelt with his cheek pressed against the rough surface of the post, resolved to not make a sound throughout the flogging. He gritted his teeth as the next blow came, followed by another, and then another; each strike was announced by his captors before ripping into his flesh like a searing fire. At the eighth blow a stifled moan escaped Tymon’s lips and by the tenth he screamed aloud, unable to keep his pledge. He did not know how he would be able to bear thirty-five. He bent over the dock-boards, gasping.
‘Keep the faith,’ murmured the Oracle sadly, in the depths of his mind. ‘Keep the faith, Tymon.’
He hardly heard her. The whip was louder. Eleven, twelve, thirteen, it cried: there was no difference between the soldier’s announcement and the blow that followed. Words shredded his skin as he knelt on the planks made slippery with his own blood. The morning sun had intensified, a blinding beam on the boardwalk immediately ahead of him. In a delirium of pain he fancied he saw a form in the light, the figure of a woman. He could not make out her features. She stretched out her hands to him, palm-upwards. In each hand she cupped a leaf, and on each leaf shone a letter traced in fire, the Letter of Union.
‘Fear neither darkness nor defeat.’ He knew the voice belonged to the shining figure, though he did not see her lips move.
‘I shall not fear,’ he said. He recalled having heard
or read similar words somewhere before. Fourteen, fifteen, cried the whip.
‘You’ll fear, alright,’ snarled the soldiers gathered about him, jostling each other. They smelled of acrid sweat. ‘We’ll see to that.’
‘Forget the quarrel between happiness and sorrow,’ cried the vision, bleeding light.
‘Forget the quarrel,’ Tymon mumbled in answer.
‘Shut up!’ shouted the shadowy soldiers. They had lost their individuality and their blurred faces — the same traits, endlessly repeated — were flattened, eyeless things with yapping mouth-holes. ‘Shut up and eat dust, traitor!’
Sixteen, seventeen, cried the whip. Even as the faces of the soldiers melted into each other the woman became more recognisable, her features visible to Tymon in fits and starts between the raking blows on his back. He saw the delicate curve of her mouth, the tangled locks of her hair, details intimately familiar to him.
‘That you and I again might meet,’ said Samiha, gazing sorrowfully down at him.
She looked as she used to in the old days, before the trial and the execution. She stood a moment on the dock before him, her hair a shining river of flame, reciting the words from her last testament. He remembered it now. He had glimpsed the lines in his brief perusal of the paper bundle, the night he had hidden from the guards in the Jays’ pavilion. But this was different. This was poetry. She finished the verse as he swayed, gasping beneath the soldier’s blows.
‘In the heart, where all divisions cease.’
Eighteen, nineteen, shrieked the whip. Tymon strained to keep sight of his love. But the vision was already dissolving, bleeding into sunlight. Sun and soldiers meshed together, and the voices on the dock became a faraway buzz. Twenty, wailed the whip in a faraway lament, while the taunts and whistles of the soldiers faded to oblivion.
He must have fainted, then, and been carried away to another location, for when he awoke, he was lying on his stomach in a dark place with his head twisted to the right and his cheek pressed to the floor. The vision of Samiha was gone. He did not know if the full sentence of thirty-five lashes had been carried out, or waived due to his infirmity; his left ear throbbed and his back was a searing mesh of agony. He heard the snap of sails and the faint discharge of ether from above, the telltale song of a dirigible.
‘Where am I?’ he croaked, though he had already guessed the answer.
‘You are in a ship belonging to Master Lovage. You belong to Master Lovage now. We all do.’
Tymon blinked as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. He was in a long, stinking chamber in the bowels of a dirigible, lit only by the dim light filtering through a grille in the ceiling. There was a person sitting beside him. A hulking, ginger-haired youth with a wide gap between his front teeth, a Nurian pilgrim. He was tall and heavyset, his round face betraying a slightly simple earnestness as he bent over Tymon.
‘They tell me you’re an evil, lying Argosian,’ declared the stranger solemnly. ‘We’re all of us evil here, of course, which is why we’re being sent to Master Lovage. He’s for the hard cases. But you must be a piece of work, because they —’ he jerked his head towards the other pilgrims slumped against the wall of the hold — ‘won’t go near you.’ He peered at Tymon’s back. ‘What did you do? Why did the masters beat you?’
Tymon squinted at the blurry faces ranged behind the Nurian lad, not caring at this point what they thought of him. Other questions preoccupied his mind. The Oracle had told him it was impossible to speak with ghosts. And yet he had Seen Samiha. He had Seen Samiha! Had he Seen her?
‘I didn’t obey,’ he said to the ginger boy. ‘I was stupid.’
‘You won’t be stupid again,’ observed the pilgrim lad, matter-of-factly. ‘I’m called Zero, by the way. Because I have zero good in me. Here, have some water.’ He retrieved a dusty gourd from the floor and helped Tymon drink, holding up his head till the drops trickled down his parched throat. ‘I don’t mind that you’re evil,’ he confided. ‘Evil folks are nicer than good ones. Good people beat you. I think everyone should be evil. That way no one would ever get hurt.’
2
The Lantrian resettler ships had cut a vengeful swathe of destruction through the Eastern Canopy after the unsuccessful raid on Sheb, attacking villages and homesteads throughout the southern half of the Domains. They no longer held back from provoking the Argosians, going so far as to attack two outposts with a colonial presence as well as the usual Nurian targets. The profits from this satisfying venture had gone some way to assuaging that first, incomprehensible loss on the Freehold. They had returned to Cherk Harbour to find that the intelligence passed on by their superiors in the New East Company had been correct: Argos was now at war with Lantria. The pirates’ raids were a cause of national celebration. But these unlikely heroes did not return home to the South Canopy at once. They stayed in Cherk Harbour, awaiting further instructions from their shadowy leader. The Reaper had not emerged from his cabin on the resettler ship Aurora for days.
Curses, filth without end poured from the mouth of the madman tied to the bed in the pirate chief’s quarters. The lunatic who was ostensibly the Reaper strained against the cords that bound him to his bunk, causing the bed frame to creak and groan dangerously. He was a large man, possessed of great brute strength. The restraints stopped him from clawing the skin off his own face with his long nails, although the red gouges on his cheeks testified to the fact that he had, on previous occasions, attained his goal. The cords also prevented him from lunging out at his companion, who sat still and watchful on the chair by his bedside.
Gowron regarded with cold patience the sick man who played host to his master. He remained unmoved when the other eviscerated him with the only weapon remaining to him: his furious, blistering words, spat out from a perpetually red and gaping mouth. The Reaper’s eyes were as wide as a panicked animal’s, bloodshot and rolling. Gowron waited until the shuddering of the bed died down and the sweating bulk upon it grew still. Slowly, the lunatic’s mouth closed. The wild light left his eyes and they became veiled and fathomless, the eyes of the Envoy.
‘Hello, Gowron,’ remarked Lace, through the Reaper’s lips.
‘Greetings, sir.’ The priest rose from his chair and swiftly undid the restraints on the bed, helping his master to sit up. ‘It’s a pleasure to have you back.’
‘For the last time, my friend. The Reaper has outlived his usefulness. The Company can do without us both, for a while: I’ll be needing you back in Argos city.’
Gowron permitted himself a conniving leer. ‘Running short of reliable acolytes, sir?’
The Envoy gazed at him a moment, his expression inscrutable, then nodded. ‘She didn’t work out.’
‘I guessed that might happen, if you don’t mind my saying so. The chit had her nose stuck way up in the air.’
‘I don’t mind you saying it, no.’ Lace beckoned him closer, laying a hairy hand on Gowron’s shoulder to heave himself up from the bed. ‘The Nurry girl was bound to be a gamble.’
‘What will you do to her? To punish her for leaving, I mean?’
The ex-priest’s question tripped out a fraction too eagerly. The Reaper raised a black eyebrow. ‘I was going to give her back to you, eventually,’ he drawled. ‘But now I really should do something for our poor, foolish Wick. I trust he has learned his lesson. I hope you don’t mind giving the girl up this time, Gowron. There will be more, I assure you.’
‘Of course not, sir.’
Gowron dropped his gaze obsequiously, but his eyes glittered under the lids as he watched the Envoy in the Reaper’s form. The pirate chief stumped over to a sideboard, retrieving ink, a hardwood pen and a sheet of smooth pulp paper from within. He leaned on the top of the sideboard to scrawl a short note.
‘Tahu will take over the resettler fleet, under the Company’s direction of course,’ he said, as the sharp nib of the plume scratched over the paper, leaving a trail of brown. ‘Company headquarters are to move to Cherk Harbour for the moment — Lantria is
no longer a reliable base. I’m sure the Governor will be delighted. I want you to return to Argos as soon as possible. Get that slinking rat, Yago, to drop you off in Marak, then find a freighter to take you home. I want you back before the new month is out. I’m sending you on a mission of my own: you’ll be using that machine you confiscated from the Freeholders.’
The Envoy signed and folded up the note, securing it with the pirate chief’s hardwood seal, leaving the folded paper on the sideboard.
‘Where will I be going, sir?’ asked Gowron politely.
‘I can’t tell you that right now,’ replied Lace. ‘But I will say this: your journey will bring you much closer to my Masters. Consider yourself privileged.’
This news seemed to discomfit rather than please Gowron. His smile faded but he bowed stiffly in acknowledgment.
‘That’s right,’ said Lace, who seemed to relish his acolyte’s unease. He stepped close to Gowron, breathing over him. ‘I’m giving you an opportunity beyond your wildest dreams, worth more than any Nurry girl, I promise you. You’ll be performing a task for the true Lords of this world. If you prove yourself worthy, you’ll be taken into their confidence.’
Gowron swallowed nervously. ‘I’ll be up to par, sir,’ he said.
‘I’m glad. My Masters do not tolerate failure,’ rasped the Envoy. He continued to fix his acolyte from under his bristling brows. ‘Now. It’s time to perform your last service for the Reaper.’ He held out the hardwood pen with a peremptory gesture.
Gowron took it, hesitating. ‘Are you absolutely sure, sir?’
‘Do it when I tell you to, you fool.’
Gowron tightened his fist about the pen and licked his lips spasmodically. Then, with a swift, practised thrust, he plunged the sharp point of the pen deep into the Reaper’s jugular vein.
The pirate chief crumpled to his knees on the floor of the cabin, his eyes still fixed on the priest. Blood spilled down his neck and soaked into his shirt, bubbling from his lips. Gowron watched his master’s host for the Exchange topple face down, collapsing in a vast and silent heap on the floor. He bent and slipped the pen into the Reaper’s hand, closing his fingers about the shaft so that the murder would seem a suicide. As the pool of red expanded beneath the dead host’s body, he turned and quit the cabin, slowly mounting the steps to the deck.
Oracle's Fire Page 3