Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  ‘Oh, I would have thought it was easy enough to avoid the war,’ she said brightly to Anise, between mouthfuls of cheese. ‘The Lantrian leaf-line is ages away. Don’t you want to get to better weather?’

  She considered the enigmatic pair, wondering if she should simply admit to knowing Tymon and deal with the consequences. Part of her, a surprisingly strong part, was tempted to make a clean breast of all her crimes and start afresh with these people. But another instinct held her back, a tried and trusted reliance on secrecy. The Jays had so far studiously avoided asking her name or how she came to be fleeing from Argos city. In fact, the few members of the troupe apart from Anise and Jocaste who had been present when she entered the tent had already melted away like ghosts, and without speaking a word to her. Whether deliberately or not, she had been left alone with Anise and Jocaste. The atmosphere in the pavilion had begun to make Jedda deeply uncomfortable. She crammed the rest of her barley-bread into her mouth.

  ‘Why are you so keen on going south?’ murmured Anise, apparently engrossed in his log book.

  ‘I’ll be honest with you. A friend — a friend of mine is in trouble,’ she stammered. ‘He’s been sent out of town in a prison cart. I wondered if you might help me to find him. You’d easily catch up with him in your ships.’

  ‘So,’ he replied slowly. ‘You’d put us all in danger again, when we’ve already stuck out our necks to help you? You’d ask us to risk our lives in order to pick up another one of your dirty louse friends?’

  Jocaste grunted in soft agreement from where she sat on the floor. ‘First we get raked over coals by the city guard for harbouring dissidents,’ she said. ‘Then we pay out all our profits in bribes — profits that should have gone to buying new sails. And now you want us to take on more fugitives? What do we look like, a louse delivery service?’

  Jedda stared at them both, at a loss as to how to respond. Did they really believe what they were saying? That Nurians were insects, unclean?

  ‘Because that’s how you must think of them, after all,’ resumed Anise, never taking his eyes away from his book. His tone had grown scathing. ‘Your countrymen: you must think they are vermin. You must believe what the priests say about them. Otherwise why would you betray your own people?’

  There was utter silence in the tent. Anise still did not look up, but Jocaste had lifted her eyes to glare at Jedda. The bread stuck like a dry lump in the Nurian girl’s throat. The Jays knew exactly who she was, she thought, panicking. They had recognised her right from the beginning. They had only extended their mercy to her for one night, perhaps the better to punish her the following day. Now the truth would be known.

  ‘Did Tymon tell you that?’ she asked, miserable.

  ‘Ah, so you admit to knowing Tymon,’ said Jocaste dryly. ‘That’s a start. Tell me: did it bother you that he, a stranger, was loyal to your people, while you were not?’

  Her ugly scar was livid as she spoke, and her eyes blazed. Jedda felt that gaze ripping into her, laying her defences low. She rose unsteadily to her feet, scattering crumbs.

  ‘You can stop judging me now,’ she said. ‘I know what I’ve done wrong. I don’t need an Argosian to tell me.’ Anise never once turned around or looked up from his book: she felt the insult keenly.

  ‘Not just any Argosian, a Jay,’ corrected Jocaste. ‘But I’m curious. If you regret listening to the priests, why wait until you were out of the city to do something about it? Why not help Tymon, or even the Kion, while you still could?’

  The last part of the phrase was like a mortal blow to Jedda. She hung her head in shame. ‘I tried,’ she whispered. ‘The Kion wouldn’t come with me.’

  Anise and Jocaste exchanged astonished glances. ‘Please,’ Jedda begged. ‘Have you never realised you made the wrong decision? Are you so perfect?’

  She addressed her question to Jocaste. It seemed to her that the Jay girl would understand her, even if Anise did not. She would know the truth when she heard it, Jedda thought, with a stab of insight, because she knew herself.

  ‘Far from it,’ said the scarred woman softly.

  ‘So, what happens now?’ Jedda’s throat had grown tight. She stood helplessly before the other two, wringing her hands with unconscious anxiety. But they did not even look at her. ‘What are you going to do with me?’

  She had meant the question to be a challenge. It came out as a broken murmur.

  ‘Do with you?’ Anise echoed, surprised. He finally faced her, putting down his pen and his book for the first time since the conversation began. ‘Why should we do anything with you? We’re not responsible for you, Jedda. Yes, we know what you’ve done. But we aren’t priests. You can’t ask us for punishment or absolution.’

  He reminded Jedda of the Oracle in his pitiless equanimity. ‘Will you at least help him?’ she pleaded with the two Jays. ‘Will you help Tymon?’

  ‘We want nothing more than to help Tymon,’ answered Jocaste. Despite her harsh intensity, she appeared less eager than Anise to judge and condemn. ‘And we are. You asked if we’d ever made mistakes. We have: many, believe me. This is our absolution. We’re carrying out Tymon’s wishes by travelling north. He would not have wanted us to follow him into danger.’

  ‘Why?’ Jedda almost groaned. ‘Alright, don’t help me, I don’t care about myself. But why not go after him? Why would he want you to go in the opposite direction? What kind of absolution is that?’

  The two Jays looked at each other again. ‘She’d find out sooner or later,’ Anise remarked, as if in reply to an unheard question.

  ‘Find out what?’ cried Jedda. ‘What’s going on here?’

  For an answer Anise rose and walked to a locker set into the floor on the other side of the pavilion. Jedda squinted to see what he was doing. He flipped open the lid and retrieved a bundle from the shallow trough beneath; her heart leapt and shuddered in her chest before she knew what he was carrying. He returned and laid a sheaf of paper in her trembling hands. The sheets were of varying quality, from smooth pulp to brittle beaten straw, all covered in a swift, flowing Argosian script.

  ‘Who wrote this?’ breathed Jedda. ‘How did you get it?’

  ‘I think you know the answers to those questions,’ Anise replied. ‘Go on. Read. You’ll understand what our mission is, and why we don’t go after Tymon.’

  Jedda said no more, but sank down on the bleacher with the bundle in her lap, as Jocaste returned to her maps and Anise took up his log book once more. Cradling the sheaf of disparate papers, the Nurian girl scanned the first lines of the crackling page. Samiha’s handwriting stared up at her, immediately recognisable. This was the text she had seen the Kion write in the room beneath the bells, the testament that had mysteriously disappeared the night before the execution. Tymon must have taken it: he must, against all hope, have managed to hide it with the Jays. No longer impatient at the thought of reading such a work, Jedda drank in the words on the page like clear water.

  Already, it grows hard for me to remember. There is nothing, there was never anything but this hold, this ship. Sheb, Marak: all are gone. Place is gone. Time has no meaning. I hear sailors shouting to each other above deck, their voices like the cry of babies. My certainties evaporate with each furlong of empty air. I am not what they say I am. I am neither heretic nor queen. I am not even the girl from Hatha. The wind snatched away my old face and I have not yet seen the new. I have begun writing because I hope to catch a glimpse of it in these pages.

  The testament was written to Tymon. It was an account of all that had happened to Samiha since she left Sheb, up to and including the trial in Argos city. It was more than that, thought Jedda: it was a conversation, a debate with an invisible friend, and a frank and open confession. The Kion addressed the young man who had briefly shared her life, telling him all that she had felt and thought in those weeks leading up to her death. It read on occasion like a private letter between two lovers, though it was clear from the text that Samiha had expected her words to be s
hared. Jedda blushed from time to time as she sat in the Jays’ pavilion that morning, devouring the papers without pause.

  It was not what was actually said that caused her pulse to race. It was the tone of the whole, the emotion of it that set her nerves tingling and brought a lump to her throat. She found herself wishing forlornly for someone to speak to her in the way Samiha spoke to Tymon. She would have liked to be the one the Kion addressed in the darkness of the tithe-ship’s hold, or in the room beneath the bells — the faithful one who was always in the prisoner’s heart, even at the bleakest of times. But she was not. She was barely mentioned in the papers as someone who had been duped by the priests. The passing reference was worse than a condemnation. Samiha never once dwelled on her treachery or blamed her for her abandonment of the Oracle in Cherk Harbour. She did not breathe a word of Jedda’s botched attempt to rescue her, the day before the execution. The overall impression the girl was left with on completing the reading was of burning embarrassment and shame. She had been judged and found wanting. Samiha’s silence regarding her was an act of mercy.

  Jedda was not the sort to let matters rest there, however. She finished reading the papers in one sitting; when she was done, she returned to the beginning and started again. She had read it the first time as herself, as Jedhartha Aditi, cringing at every memory the tale provoked. On the second reading, she laid aside her shared history with the Kion and actually studied the testament. Samiha’s account not only dealt with the past and present of her incarceration: it actively courted the future. There were times when she spoke of her hopes for Nur and even for Argos, cautioning Tymon against the problems she saw arising as the two nations inevitably went to war. By the end of her second perusal, Jedda realised the testament was precisely that — a statement of belief, an assessment of behaviour. It made no bones of criticising the seminary while at the same time challenging Nurian rebels on their use of violence.

  Jedda pored over it, curled up on the uninviting bleacher in the draughty pavilion, long after Jocaste had finished plotting their course and Anise had laid aside his notebook, rising to carry out other duties. She was still reading the testament when the Jays moored their ships among the icy upper twigs and met in the main tent for lunch, stamping their feet and warming their hands over the hardwood stove. And she continued to be absorbed in the Kion’s words throughout that afternoon, until the barges returned below the leaf-line to pass the night in more sheltered regions of the Tree. By the time the travellers had gathered for supper in the pavilion, she had finished her third reading of the testament from start to finish, and could barely contain her excitement. For she knew, then, that it was a rousing call for change.

  ‘It’s a prophecy!’ she exclaimed to Anise, hurrying up to him as soon as he entered the tent. ‘It’s not just the past. It’s the future!’

  ‘Exactly.’ He steered her gently towards the empty space at the centre of the tent where the Jays were seating themselves in a loose circle. ‘You see now why we must tell the Kion’s tale to the world. That is our mission.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jedda, frowning, as she knelt down on the bare floorboards. ‘But I do believe we need to go after Tymon first. He should read this: there’s no way he could have done so before he gave it to you. It’s for him. He’s at the centre of it all somehow — the Kion says so.’

  The last members of the troupe were now entering the pavilion, bearing the food for the evening meal. It had been prepared on one of the smaller barges and brought to the main tent on wide communal platters. Jocaste sat herself down on the other side of Anise and, to Jedda’s relief, smiled briefly at her. But Anise only shook his head in answer.

  ‘The Kion speaks to all of us,’ he cautioned. ‘I know this sort of prose style. Half the epics I learned off by heart as a child were written in the confessional mode. This is how Saint Loa and Saint Usala wrote, as if speaking to a dear friend. Samiha isn’t just talking to Tymon: she is talking to each and every one of us.’

  ‘But he’s to meet her in the heart of the world,’ protested Jedda.

  ‘We will all meet the Kion in our hearts, if we truly live by her words.’

  Jedda frowned again, uneasy with this glib answer. ‘What if there’s more to it?’ she objected. ‘I’m sure you’re right, it’s also for the rest of us, but couldn’t it be primarily addressed to him?’

  ‘What for?’ asked Anise in surprise. ‘If the prophecies were about him, I’d agree with you. But they aren’t. They are about Nur and Argos in general. Why cover topics that concern everyone, if you’re addressing your work to one person?’

  Jedda racked her brains for a means of expressing what she suspected without coming across as mad, or else undermining the Kion, which she no longer wished to do. Samiha was a Born, but had chosen to hide that fact for reasons Jedda was dimly beginning to guess at. She had a plan, a reality that went beyond the human one. Complexity rather than simplicity was likely to be the rule here, Jedda surmised; the testament contained many truths nested together, each one fitting into the next without negating the one before. Samiha was speaking to all, but also to one. She had made public as well as private predictions in her testament. And she was able to do this, to find the balance between seeming contradictions, precisely because she was a Born. It was harder, however, to explain such notions to Anise. Jedda found herself reluctant to give away the secret of the Kion’s true nature: it would only cause others to doubt her motives.

  ‘If I weren’t a Grafter, I might agree with you,’ she said carefully. ‘I might think it was all symbolic. But I know people like Tymon really do walk in other worlds. There might be a place he can find Samiha — a place we can’t go — don’t you see?’

  ‘I see that you care deeply for Tymon,’ observed Anise, smiling in his turn.

  He indicated that she should help herself to the food on the steaming plates set before them. The meal consisted of lentils cooked in a bewildering variety of ways, served with large pieces of flatbread. There were no spoons or forks. Everyone dipped their fingers in bowls of rainwater passed around the circle, then used torn sections of bread to scoop up the lentils directly from the dish. Jedda was more than happy to follow the Jays’ lead, for she had had no more than a few mouthfuls at lunch. This manner of dining reminded her, with an unexpected pang of homesickness, of Nurian customs. It was a welcome change from the stuffy formality of the seminary.

  ‘If you care for him, then hear this,’ continued Anise, as they ate. ‘He did not keep the testament, because he knew he was always going to be hunted down by the priests. The words of the Kion are more important than any one person’s life. The testament must survive and reach its audience. It would not do so if we rushed off after him, and were caught and imprisoned ourselves.’

  ‘Believe me,’ put in Jocaste, ‘Anise and I have had this very conversation several times over the past few days. I for one took a great deal of convincing before I was ready to give up the idea of a chase. But he’s right, Jedda. Our priority now is the testament. We can’t run the risk of losing it.’

  Jedda unhappily digested this fact with her lentils. She could not see why she and a few others might not travel south in one of the smaller barges, while the others went north and kept the papers safe. But Anise seemed immovable in his convictions, stubbornly refusing to countenance even the slightest change in course. Jedda wondered what could render a man so sure about anything: her own heart was never at peace, always doubting itself. She almost envied him his certainties.

  As the meal went on, she gave up attempting to argue the point, and sat in silent thought, considering her rather reduced options. She might travel north with the Jays until a better opportunity presented itself. Or she might strike out on her own — a hazardous affair in winter, as she had seen on her first doomed attempt to leave Argos city. Even if she succeeded against all odds in catching up with Tymon, it would only be to carry out her original plan of a rescue. He would never have access to more of the testament than w
hat her own verbal summary, inevitably incomplete, could provide. She might copy out the papers for him, but that would take days; with each passing day the chance of finding him on the South Road diminished. The whole affair was frustrating in the extreme.

  She was so lost in her ruminations that she never saw the others clearing away the empty bowls and platters at the end of the meal, or noticed when they drew together again in a tight knot about the stove in the far corner of the pavilion. Night was deep outside when the cold roused her from her reverie, and she looked up to find herself isolated on the tent floor. Someone was singing in a low, crooning voice, in a dialect unfamiliar to her. One of the youths by the stove was playing a melancholy tune on a stringed instrument, a traditional Jay air, from what Jedda could tell. She approached the people huddled about the glowing, crackling fire in its pot-bellied range — the one point of heat and light in the icy pavilion — and watched from the sidelines as the Jay boy finished one song, then launched into another, in Argosian. This time, she recognised the words.

  Ye are the wind that carries forth the flame.

  Before you, cities crumble, hearts are changed.

  The lines were from Samiha’s testament. The musician had modified them slightly to fit his meter, and the words that had been addressed to Tymon now sounded like a rousing hymn. Other voices chimed in as he continued, and soon most of the Jays were chanting Samiha’s verses. Jedda scrutinised her companions in the pavilion with surprise. They sang earnestly, as if delivering one of the primary liturgies of the Tree. Her gaze came to rest on Anise, sitting cross-legged on the floor beside Jocaste; his eyes were closed and his expression full of joy as he held on to his scarred partner’s hand. Even Jocaste sang the words of the testament in her low, rasping voice. The pair suddenly reminded Jedda of Oren and Noni. The Jays evidently believed in Samiha as one might believe in the prophets of old. She was not only an inspirational leader to them, but a divine figure, to be venerated as a living representative of the Sap. They had made a religion out of her.