Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  After several hours of wandering up and down the pathless branches, occupied by such dismal speculation, she came upon an isolated terrace-farm and was able to rest for the night in a barn stocked with root vegetables and animal feed. She knew better than to rely on that shelter for long, however, and left the terraces again at sunrise, her pockets stuffed with the life-saving tubers. She followed the farmer’s track up to the higher regions of the canopy, finding to her relief that it joined a small but serviceable branch-road headed south and east among the close-growing twigs. She guessed this path would lead to other settlements and perhaps eventually link up with the South Road. The twining connection with Tymon still tingled faintly in her belly, reassuring her that he had not passed completely beyond her reach. The mission to help her fellow Grafter had taken on paramount importance; she clung to it like a lifeline, as if saving him were the only means to save herself. She rejected the misgiving in her heart which suggested, almost in the Envoy’s mocking tones, that in seeking to rescue Tymon, she would only bring her curse down on him, too.

  About halfway through the morning, her journey was interrupted by the sound of wheels approaching from behind. Wary now of meeting anyone, she hid in the twig-stands by the road and watched as a covered wagon pulled by a single snorting herd-beast rolled by on the lines of parallel planks. The peasant driving the vehicle was bundled in shawls and blankets from head to foot; only his shrewd eyes were visible over the folds, peering out from under a wide-brimmed hat. The encounter made Jedda feel exposed, and she realised that it would be safer for her to travel by night. So she found a crevice among the twigs large enough to hide inside, and passed the rest of the day snatching intermittent rounds of sleep, wrapped once more in the dry grasses for warmth.

  When evening came, she rose and pressed on in the freezing darkness. The Argosian winter proved to be the main obstacle to her progress, as she had feared: her feet and fingers grew numb after barely an hour, a dangerous prelude to frostbite. She was able to stuff her boots with the readily available dried grass but the rest of her remained achingly cold, even under the thick seminary cloak of shillie-wool. After some thought, she took the sheets of Samiha’s testament and packed them carefully inside her undergarments, padding the bulky paper close to her skin. The solution both protected the testament and made it easier to carry, giving her a much-needed layer of warmth.

  As night wore on, the full moon broke loose from the clouds to shine on the snowy planks of the road, lighting the way. Jedda stumbled forward, half-asleep, her mind as sluggish as her limbs. The journey seemed endless. She had always been on this road, groping through this snowy gloom, this moonlit silence. Only the Envoy’s mocking whisper echoed in her memory, chilling her heart even as the sharp wind chilled her body. Abomination, it repeated time and time again. Abomination. But Jedda’s wits were honed for survival. Even in her dismal state, her attention was caught at length by a strange sight far above, a moving shape flitting over the full disc of the moon. It was swiftly followed by another. Jedda blinked upwards in confusion, wondering what creatures flew at this late hour. They were too big to be bats. Were they birds? They wheeled through the canopy, descending ever closer over the leaf-thickets, silent as drifting clouds.

  At that moment, as she walked along the road planks with her head thrown back, frowning at the sky, someone grabbed her from behind. Her arms were twisted and pinned against her back, and she was unable to move. She felt the cold nudge of a hardwood blade against her throat.

  ‘Not another step, moonlight traveller,’ hissed a muffled voice in her ear, speaking in Argosian. ‘Or your night-walks end with this one.’

  A second shadow detached itself from the twigs by the road and darted up to Jedda, rifling through the pockets of her cloak and patting her legs and torso with practised ease. This individual’s face was wrapped in a thick scarf so that only the eyes were visible, glinting over the fabric. Jedda realised, with a contradictory surge of relief, that she had been accosted by nothing more terrible than a pair of highway robbers. Unfortunately for them, she was carrying nothing of monetary value.

  ‘Breadroot,’ remarked the second thief bemusedly, withdrawing one of the tubers from Jedda’s pockets. From the tenor of his voice, he was a young lad. ‘It’s a girl,’ he added as his hands passed over the relevant parts of her anatomy.

  ‘Well, well,’ observed the muffled voice from behind Jedda. ‘What a surprise.’

  Her attacker released her, and she was free to turn around and scrutinise her adversary. She did so calmly, for the threat of violence no longer troubled her. She knew, after what had happened to Anise, that she was far more dangerous to others than they were to her; and though she was ashamed of it, she could not deny that the thought gave her a certain furtive satisfaction. The figure standing before her was engulfed in a voluminous shawl wrapped tightly about the nose and throat, and wore a long cloak and wide-brimmed hat. Jedda recognised the silhouette. It belonged to the peasant who had passed her the day before in the cart.

  ‘You’re not the least bit frightened, are you?’ murmured her muffled interlocutor, unwinding the shawl. ‘If I were a young woman, walking alone at night in these remote parts, I’d be a little more wary.’ The shawl dropped down and the thief’s face was exposed: it was smiling, mischievously handsome, and female.

  ‘Oh, wait.’ The highwaywoman shook out a cascade of dark curls from under the hat. ‘I am one,’ she noted with a grin.

  ‘Shall we stick her?’ asked the boy who had made the search. He had loosened his own scarf to reveal a sullen, acne-pocked countenance, perhaps a year or two younger than Jedda. ‘She ain’t got nothing.’

  ‘Patience, Lud,’ admonished his companion. Her black eyes lingered appreciatively on Jedda. ‘We have quite a specimen here. It’s a treasure in itself. Look at the colour of it. See how bright and soft it is.’

  She circled around the Nurian girl like a prowling Tree-cat, gazing at her with frank admiration from both the front and back, and peering at her face under the hood. Jedda stared back warily and kept still, deciding for the moment to allow events to unfold as they would. If the thieves intended to kill her, or ‘stick’ her, as the boy named Lud had termed it, they would have done so already, she reasoned. The highwaywoman wanted something else. Though ragged and tinged with grime, this extraordinary creature exuded an energetic carelessness, an air of owning the whole world. She reached up and playfully pushed the hood off Jedda’s head so that the fair Nurian locks glinted in the moonlight.

  ‘Shiny,’ breathed the thief-woman.

  ‘A runaway pilgrim,’ sneered Lud. ‘Who cares?’

  ‘There are no female pilgrims,’ said his companion. She winked rakishly at Jedda. ‘Are there, my beauty?’

  Jedda conceded this point with a cautious smile and shrug. There could be any number of reasons why the bandit had decided to spare her. Not all were advantageous.

  ‘Oh, you’re good,’ chortled the black-eyed thief. ‘Now I have to know more. I can’t resist.’

  She offered Jedda her arm, as gallant as a young Argosian lord, though it was clear she had never set foot in any civilised region of the Central Canopy. She might have been about nineteen; certainly she was young enough to be a sister to Jedda. ‘I hope you’ll forgive our earlier misunderstanding,’ she declared. ‘I’d like to hear where you pinched that Tree-preacher’s cloak. Come and visit with me and my merry band tonight.’

  ‘Merry bat-shit,’ swore Lud. ‘Don’t bring this one home, Varana. Please.’

  The woman ignored him. ‘Do come,’ she appealed prettily, when Jedda did not move. She indicated the dusting of frost on the seminary cloak. ‘You can’t deny you need our help. We don’t care if you’re Nurian. Free food and a bed for the night — no grief, I promise. Breadroot gets dreary after a while, doesn’t it? You can go on your way in the morning. Or tomorrow night, if you prefer. Whenever you like.’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ asked Jedda.

  Wh
en the woman shrugged and smiled in her turn, Jedda slowly accepted the proffered arm. There was something attractive about Varana, a tearaway charm that made her forget for the time being that the highwaywoman had recently been holding a knife to her throat. To resist the invitation would mean calling on the power of the orah-pendant, which Jedda wished to do only as a last resort. She allowed herself to be drawn off the road and into the leaf-thickets.

  ‘What’s your name?’ Varana queried, as they walked.

  ‘June,’ said Jedda unthinkingly, then bit her lip, wondering what had possessed her to choose her dead sister’s name.

  ‘June. That’s lovely.’

  ‘Shit,’ groaned the pockmarked boy again, stumping after them. ‘Another one of your lame stray bawds. I’m sick of this shit.’

  ‘Watch your foul mouth, Lud,’ said the highwaywoman.

  The boy did not respond, kicking at the snow with his boots as they passed between the twigs. ‘Shit,’ he repeated to himself, after a while.

  Jedda glanced up at the pale orb of the moon glinting through the serried leaves. There was now no sign of the wheeling avian shapes above.

  They walked on for about a quarter of a mile before coming to the basin-like hollow in the bark where the bandits had made their camp. The rest of Varana’s ‘merry band’ consisted of two decidedly morose-looking men sitting hunched over a glowing fire on the floor of the hollow. Behind them, Jedda glimpsed the covered cart with its herd-beast patiently chewing dried moss. The animal had evidently been coaxed up to the hollow from another point on the road.

  One of those sitting by the fire, a taciturn fellow with stooped shoulders whom Jedda later learned was named Ambrose, barely glanced up as they arrived. His companion, however — a short, barrel-chested fellow — leapt to his feet, tense as a spring and overwrought, his ginger-coloured eyebrows bristling at the sight of Varana’s new guest. Jedda had noticed some time ago that Argosians were not as homogenous a people as they imagined themselves to be: there were fair-skinned individuals among them, people with green eyes and reddish hair, even as there were darker, Argosian-looking people in the East. The squat little man looked outwardly like a Nurian, though from the shocked invective that spewed from his mouth she suspected he would have taken great umbrage at that comparison.

  ‘She’s with me,’ answered Varana imperturbably, fending off the other’s objections. ‘No, I haven’t lost my tiny female mind. Yes, she’s a runaway. No, I don’t care. Why do I bother with her? Have you no eyes? Shoot, meet June. June, meet Shoot. He’s a prize fool.’

  ‘Yes, I got eyes,’ spat the red-haired Argosian, the two green and globular organs in question almost popping out of his head in outrage. ‘I see a damned-to-root problem, is what I see. I see trouble. I see you only thinking about yourself, as usual.’

  ‘Live with it,’ drawled the highwaywoman. ‘June is staying for as long as she likes. You’ll all be nice to her, please.’

  The stooped man, the last member of the band, had not moved from his position by the fire bowl. He gazed without particular interest at Jedda and continued warming himself in front of the crackling flames, rubbing his knuckles together.

  ‘We need to get closer to Ethis,’ he remarked. ‘Three empty nights, Varana. This can’t go on.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Varana said, interrupting as the red-haired Shoot tried to protest again. ‘Ethis will have better pickings. It’s worth the risk. We’ll turn south tomorrow.’ She cocked her head at Jedda. ‘Does that suit you?’ she asked solicitously.

  ‘South is fine,’ replied Jedda. ‘I was heading that way myself.’

  ‘Listen to hoity-toity,’ growled the red-haired man. ‘Looks like a priest, talks like a priest. Who trained this monkey?’

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ sighed Varana, rolling her eyes.

  Lud squatted down by the fire next to the stooped man and warmed himself at the flames. ‘Ape-shit,’ he remarked meditatively, to no one in particular.

  Shoot subsided onto the bark beside the placidly chewing herd-beast, muttering a string of curses.

  ‘Come on,’ said Varana to Jedda. She took her by the hand and drew her towards the covered cart. ‘Leave these dull folks to themselves. I want to hear the story of the pilgrim and the priest.’

  She pulled Jedda up the small folding ladder that led into the back of the cart. The vehicle turned out to be a sleeping wagon, complete with rumpled bedding spread out on every inch of available floor space. There was even a hammock strung from the hardwood hoops supporting the canvas roof. Varana took down a basket lantern and a box of firesticks from a shelf, coaxed a flame to life in the lamp and hung it from a hook, filling the vehicle with a sputtering orange glow.

  ‘My friends are idiots,’ she observed to Jedda after a moment, installing herself cross-legged on a bed at the back of the wagon. ‘They’ve plenty of brawn, but barely half a brain between them, I’m afraid. Ignore them.’

  She rummaged under the pillow to retrieve a small pipe and a bag of jar-weed, and patted the covers beside her, inviting Jedda to sit down. Cautious as ever, the Nurian girl knelt down on the bed. She shook her head when Varana offered the lit pipe. It was a great relief to be out of the icy wind.

  ‘The world is full of idiots,’ Varana said comfortably, blowing a smoke ring up towards the lamp. ‘Tree-preachers most of all. Tell me how you nabbed that cloak.’

  But she did not allow Jedda to speak, despite the fact that she had asked three times to hear her story. Instead, she laid aside her pipe, reaching out a languid hand to caress Jedda’s cheek. Then she hooked her arm about the Nurian girl’s waist and drew her close.

  ‘I love it that you’re not afraid,’ she murmured, before planting a kiss on Jedda’s mouth.

  And because the night was cold, and everyone she had ever cared about was either dead or far away, Jedda let her do it.

  The decision to yield to Varana bought her three days of grace, during which the covered wagon with its lacklustre occupants rolled south along the branch-roads, inching into more inhabited regions of the canopy. On the first morning they passed a small settlement, a collection of ten bark-brick huts huddled together in a horizontal knothole. Every one of the inhabitants, as far as Jedda could tell, was equipped with a broom, rake or hay-fork. The villagers watched suspiciously from their doorways as Varana drove the wagon through the centre of the knothole and wound out and up the road along the crest of the limb. No one hailed or greeted them, though the highwaywoman tipped her hat politely to the peasants, her disdain hidden safely behind her shawl. They gazed back at her with the dull abhorrence of the settled for those who travel.

  Jedda never left the relative security of the vehicle until nightfall. During the day, she dozed on Varana’s bed, or peered from behind the canvas at the changing Treescape outside the wagon. She thought of Anise as they jolted in silence along the branch-roads, and of Pallas, and Tymon; after a while, the faces of the young men became blurred and indistinct in her mind. Like her, the other members of the thieves’ band only emerged from their berths in the evenings, when they came to a halt. The two men and the pockmarked boy pointedly ignored Jedda, though they sat only a few feet from her in the rattling cart. She learned not to ask her fellow travellers questions or indeed to make any form of conversation at all, for she knew that she would only get a stare and a shrug in answer. Shoot simply turned his back to her when she spoke.

  At night she hovered on the fringes of the group by the campfire, listening to the bandits argue about where next to mount their operations. The group was running dangerously low on winter food stocks, which consisted mostly of dried fruit, winter tubers and the occasional piece of fresh game. But the canopy had remained locked in a deep frost over the past week and the snowy world seemed entirely empty of life. To make matters worse, there had been no travellers to accost, no ‘pickings’ for the bandits for days, and everyone was in the very worst of tempers.

  By Jedda’s second evening in the company of the thieves
, they were reduced to finishing off her stock of breadroot. She sat on a twig-stump some distance from the fire and listened to the others trading insults, wondering if she would ever find Tymon again. The twining connection had dwindled to no more than a whisper in her belly, and she guessed that he was travelling by dirigible now, beyond her reach. She was cold, weary, and achingly lonely. Her encounters with Varana — short, sharp affairs conducted in the dubious privacy of the wagon — gave her little comfort. The thief-woman had hardly spoken to her after the first night; by the second, she had taken to ignoring Jedda almost as completely as the others. Her careful solicitude vanished, and the fictitious story of the pilgrim remained untold.

  At dawn the next morning, following a night excursion of his own, Shoot brought a stolen child back to the wagon.

  He said it came from a nearby farm, and that they should trade it back to its family in exchange for food. Varana lost her temper and accused him of being a gross liability to the band. It was not the cruelty of the kidnapping that provoked her fury, but the fact that they might easily be hunted down by the farmer in retaliation for the crime. She pointed out with scathing sarcasm that a man could run faster than their plodding herd-beast; worse still, a posse bent on revenge might hunt them down on a harvester’s dirigible, cutting them off on the winding road long after they had quit the farm. Jedda crouched in the wagon on Varana’s bed, listening to the two rage at each other outside. She stared at the boy kneeling in a shivering heap in the opposite corner of the sleeping cart.

  He was about six years old, a rumpled, peaked little fellow with enormous brown eyes that seemed to take up his entire face. He said no word but returned her gaze in abject terror.

  ‘I’m Jedda,’ she whispered, in an attempt to comfort him. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to harm you. I don’t want to be here, either.’