‘No!’ cried Tymon, in sudden alarm.
He scrambled out of his nest of blankets, cursing as the movement wrenched his muscles, seized by the fear that the air-chariot was already whisking him away on its trip north. He did not want to go north. He had been overcome, as he lay in his bed, by the abrupt and complete conviction that Samiha had appeared in the mine precisely because he had been close to her there. He could only think that she was trapped somewhere deep inside the Tree, perhaps injured, perhaps lying helpless in a crevice. All other matters receded to the background, even his dream of the Oracle. He did not stop to consider that the mine in the South Canopy was far from the place where Samiha had actually fallen into the West Chasm, near Argos city. The answer to his problems seemed obvious in the morning sunlight. He must return to the mine and find her.
He rose and lurched past the surprised Farhang soldier at the machine’s controls, almost throwing himself out of the hatch. He was wearing nothing on his chest but his bandages; the cold morning air took his breath away as he tumbled on the bark.
‘What’s wrong?’ Noni was beside him in a flash, helping him up. ‘What’s happening, Tymon?’
The young man belatedly noticed one of the Saffid youths peering out from under the air-chariot, his curious face smudged with soot, and the camp paraphernalia still spread out over the bark ledge and glittering in the sunlight. It had only been a test run of the propellers, after all.
‘I thought we were leaving,’ he answered, apologetic. ‘I’m not going north with you, Noni. I know what I have to do, now.’
‘Which is?’
As there was evidently no emergency, Noni’s reaction to this announcement was dry, her voice crisp. She surveyed him with her hands placed on her hips. She looked tired, he thought ruefully. He noticed the tents planted about the bark plateau and the remains of a cooking fire in the camp. She must have been working half the night, doing everything possible to make the fugitives feel comfortable; she would not appreciate what he was about to say. He was going to pass responsibility for the Saffid on to her.
‘I have to go back into the mine and search for Samiha,’ he answered, in a rush.
‘Oh, for the love of the Tree.’
Noni reacted with more anger, or perhaps disappointment than he had anticipated, striding off to the edge of the plateau, her expression as grim as the Storm itself. The other people in the camp glanced up as she passed, surprised. Tymon began to follow her but thought better of it, grabbing his blanket from the machine before joining her on the ledge overlooking the clouds.
He was glad of the good shillee’s wool against the chill wind that blew out of the Gap, as he peered into Noni’s scowling face. She reminded him briefly of Samiha, then, as his love had been when he first met her in Argos city. There was some resemblance between the two girls after all — particularly when they were angry with him. But Noni had grown in the past few months, her frame solid and sensible compared with Samiha’s thin, almost transparent form.
‘I know you don’t approve,’ he began carefully, ‘and that you think Samiha’s life shouldn’t be tampered with, because she’s a Born —’
‘It’s not what I approve of that matters,’ broke in Noni, lowering her voice so that they would not be overheard. ‘It’s just that we’ve been through all this before. Doesn’t it seem rather familiar to you?’ She gazed at him unhappily. ‘How many times are you going to rush off to rescue the Kion? You did it once already, and it didn’t work.’
It was Tymon’s turn to feel annoyed. He had put up with this sort of needling from the woman he loved, but was beginning to tire of it from other quarters.
‘Samiha was actually very grateful that I came to Argos,’ he said, a little huffily. ‘She called me her Witness. I don’t know what that means, but I’m damned if I’m going to walk away from this. What do you expect from me? That I pass up the chance to help her, if she’s alive? What kind of gutless coward do you think I am?’
‘I don’t say pass it up,’ replied Noni. ‘I say, be wise. Let’s do this together. Come home: let the Focals guide you. The result will be to your advantage, I assure you.’
He shook his head. ‘It would take too long. The trek to the Spur of Sails and then the trip to Farhang — days. What if she’s in trouble and needs me now? She’s down there, in the heart of the Tree, I know it. I have to go to her. You’ll be fine to bring the others home without me.’
‘Will we be fine?’ she echoed, bitter. ‘Does it ever occur to you that people might need you for tasks that aren’t quite so glorious? It’s not just getting the mineworkers to their new home. It’s afterwards. Helping them settle. Defending them. The Focal group will always be incomplete without you, Tymon. We need our Fifth. There, I’ve said it. But you don’t care about that. It’s boring. You take what you need from us, food and medicine and transport, then you’re off again to be a hero.’
‘It’s not like that,’ he protested.
‘There was something heroic to be done, actually,’ she continued, her voice trembling with emotion. ‘We were supposed to begin training young Grafters again. The best defence is offence. That’s what the Oracle wanted you to do next; we were going to raise a mighty call in the world of the Sap and draw all those with the Sight to Farhang, for training. We can’t do it properly without you. We need our Fifth.’
‘I didn’t know,’ he said.
Then, he remembered that he had. The Oracle had mentioned the idea already in Chal, telling him that they would return to the Freehold and ‘tackle the Envoy’ together. She had furthermore cautioned them all on the subject of the defenceless Grafters during the conversation in the trance; the image of Jedda fighting off the abominable birds, alone and unaided, returned fleetingly to Tymon. He thrust it away, impatient. It was Samiha who needed him now.
‘I’ll be back as soon as I can,’ he promised Noni. ‘I see why you need my help. In the meantime, it’s not as though you’re completely alone —’
But she was already stamping off towards the air-chariot, furious. She began to wrathfully pack up the camping equipment, slapping blankets together and shoving pots in bags as if they had committed some outrage against her. He watched her a moment, wondering at her continued refusal to help Samiha; the thought that she might be jealous crossed his mind. He could not remain angry with her after her last plea, however, and soon pursued her with the aim of making peace. As he did so, he found Zero plucking at his elbow, pulling him aside.
‘We’ve been talking, Lord,’ he said. ‘Me and the others from the mine.’
‘I’m not your Lord,’ sighed Tymon, his eyes still on Noni.
‘We want to say thanks for what you did. You stuck by us in Chal. You warned us. You did everything you could —’
‘Of course I did!’ interrupted Tymon, with an edge of impatience, turning to Zero. ‘I couldn’t just leave my friends there to die, could I? And some of you did die, in spite of everything,’ he added, his heart softening at the sight of the Marak lad’s wide, earnest countenance. ‘So I let you down. I just wish Dawn and Nightside could be here.’
He picked out the Saffid woman’s bier, lying beyond the air-chariot at the edge of the plateau. The body had been dressed for the inevitable funeral, wrapped in a spare cloak and bound with strips of flexible bark to the bier. Zero’s gaze followed his.
‘We’re going to say the last goodbye to her soon,’ resumed the Marak lad quietly. ‘Like I say: because of everything you’ve done, we want it to be you. We want you to sing the Song of the Dead.’
‘What?’ Tymon blinked at his companion in confusion, the request finally sinking in. ‘But it’s women who always sing the Song. In Argos and in Nur.’
‘We,’ said Zero, nodding towards the other Saffid — the tribesmen had been staring at the two of them for a while, Tymon realised with a shiver — ‘want you to sing it this time, with the girl from the Freehold.’
They would not be gainsaid. Once provisions for the journey
had been divided up between those who were walking to the Spur of Sails, and the rest of the camping gear packed away in the air-chariot, the Saffid gathered around Noni and petitioned her in their own language. She did not make much of an objection, or indeed speak more than three words altogether to them. Tymon barely had the time to fetch himself a spare tunic from the air-chariot’s stores and splash some cold water from a gourd over his face, before he was invited to stand by the bier, alongside the taciturn Noni. The Saffid watched him expectantly. This was indeed all he had left to give Dawn, he realised. He had not been able to do more for her.
He cleared his throat, and began haltingly to sing the words of the liturgy he had always heard, but never uttered. He sang in Argosian while Noni answered him in Nurian. As he did so, he remembered Nightside together with Dawn, the absence of one wrapped up in the fragile presence of the other. Despite their faults, he thought, they had been two of the most extraordinary people he had ever met. They had led lives of unmitigated disaster, and still managed to keep their faith. They had spread hope where there was none, created trust where there was nothing left to believe in but belief itself. He admired that capacity, even if he questioned its aims; he did not think he possessed the same strength.
After the Song was done, and he and Noni had moved a respectful distance from the body, two of Dawn’s tribesmen lifted up the bier. It was light: Dawn’s thin corpse was no burden at all. They slung her off the plateau and into the void beyond without difficulty, where she disappeared in an instant, erased by cloud. But the recollection of the Saffid girl and all she had suffered lingered in Tymon’s mind.
‘Why do they get sick?’ he whispered to Noni, when the rest of the group had shuffled to the brink to peer after their lost companion. He asked her about the Saffid because he hardly dared speak to her of anything else; her mouth was still set with disapproval. ‘Do the Focals believe in this curse nonsense too? Is it something like the Envoy’s birds?’
‘There are really no such things as curses,’ Noni responded in a flat voice. ‘Or magic. Sorcery, science, even the Grafting: it’s all the same thing by different names, which is knowledge, arrived at by various means. We don’t know what really happened to the Saffid, but my guess is that their ancestors ran afoul of a rogue Born. Those like the Masters had the power to afflict people over generations, twisting something inside them so they couldn’t have healthy children. It’s the power to make and unmake, and yes, in that sense it’s like the birds. Have you ever wondered where we come from, Tymon, or why we resemble the Born to a degree?’
He shook his head. Noni almost resembled one of the Born herself, he thought; she had Ashekiel’s implacable conviction.
‘The old gods had human faces.’ Her expression as she turned towards him now was no longer scowling, only sad. ‘But it would be more accurate to say that we were made in their image, the image of the Born. Long ago. Our creators weren’t perfect. Those who were truly good taught us the Grafting, so we could know and worship something better than themselves.’
Tymon frowned at the backs of the Saffid, gathered together in a knot and blinking down into the cloudy well after Dawn. He wanted to ask Noni why it was necessary to worship anything at all, why human beings could not learn to think independently, instead of blindly obeying some higher power, even the Sap. Samiha had never asked for his obeisance, Born or not. Suddenly, in the midst of his ruminations, he realised the Saffid had all turned to face him again. They shuffled towards him as one, silent as ever. Even those who were not members of the tribe, the ordinary Nurians or Lantrians, hung eagerly at the edges of the crowd, their eyes devouring him. It was a look he knew all too well, smacking of Dawn’s fervent belief.
‘Yes?’ he asked them, wary.
‘Lord,’ began one of the youths, speaking for the group. Tymon recognised one of the boys he had first approached in the mine. ‘We know you cannot stay with us. We know you have to go.’
‘You do?’ he mumbled, then remembered that he had made no effort to keep his announcement that morning a secret.
‘We Saffid believe in you, Lord. You will return and cure us one day. We believe in prophecy.’
‘Ah,’ he answered miserably.
‘Maybe it takes years. But we have faith.’
‘The Sap help me,’ he muttered under his breath.
‘In meantime, we swear fealty.’ The youth stepped forward, his eyes bright with gratitude. ‘Hail, Lord. We are yours.’
He knelt on the bark before Tymon and, to his deep embarrassment, kissed the hem of his tunic.
‘Hail, hail.’
The whisper went through the group like wind. One by one, the Saffid bowed and pledged their allegiance to him. Some touched Tymon’s hand or his clothes, and some, to his horror, stretched themselves out on the bark to kiss his feet. He knew very well that he had done nothing so great that it might deserve adulation, and tried to remonstrate with them and pull them up, but they refused to listen. The fact that he was about to abandon them and resume his search for Samiha made the experience that much more unbearable. Through it all, Noni stood wordless at his side, neither participating in nor condemning the ritual. He grew hot in the face, and quite irritated with her when she did nothing to help him.
‘Why do you put up with it?’ he burst out in a loud whisper, when they had both retreated to the air-chariot to make their final preparations for departure. ‘They shouldn’t be treating me like this! Why do you let them?’
She appeared to have decided to accept, or at least tolerate, his decision to leave. She calmly handed him one of the Freeholders’ small backpacks containing food rations and a blanket. ‘You tried to stop them and couldn’t,’ she observed. ‘What makes you think I’d have better luck? When people are determined in their prejudices, there is nothing one can do.’
He was annoyed by the inference that he was being as stubborn as the Saffid. ‘You could tell them I’m just an ordinary Grafter like you!’ he pointed out. ‘We make predictions — that’s what we do! I mean, if you want to train up a whole army of us, we can’t be so unusual, right?’
‘The Saffid wouldn’t listen. It’s not just the predictions. They believe you’re special, more so than an ordinary Grafter. They need someone to follow and revere: it helps them carry on. They’ve had hard lives, as you’ve noticed.’
Tymon checked through the contents of the pack, snorting with irritation. He was thinking of the Saint’s abominable posturing in Argos city. ‘They shouldn’t be following an ordinary person like this,’ he said. ‘They should learn to think for themselves.’
She pursed her lips. ‘As you’re doing right now.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he asked, eyeing her.
‘You know very well. Are you sure you’re thinking for yourself, in deciding to go to the mine?’
‘What else could I possibly be doing?’
She shrugged. ‘A vision is a very personal revelation. So is a Sending. Do you know where yours came from, exactly? Are you sure they’re legitimate messages?’
‘I don’t believe this!’ His voice had risen with indignation; he lowered it, glancing over his shoulder at the open hatch. ‘You’re still questioning my vision of Samiha? Even when it led us out of the mine?’
‘Yes.’
‘What exactly do you think happened? That I hallucinated from fatigue, got lucky and somehow managed to miraculously choose the right passage out of a thousand?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’d know more if you consented to come back to the Freehold, and let the Focal group Read you.’
‘Oh no, not that again,’ he retorted in disgust. ‘No thanks. I’d rather take a chance on my heart. It’s pretty clear to me you lot Read what you want to Read.’
Even as he uttered the ugly words, he was suffused with shame. She looked so distressed that he regretted the outburst immediately.
‘Is that really what you think of us?’ she said with an expression of dismay.
/> But even though he had only spoken out of frustration, he could not bring himself to apologise. ‘I just wish you’d have some faith in me,’ he grumbled. ‘I wish you’d give me your blessing, for once. It’s like struggling against the wind, the whole time.’
‘We have faith in you as a person. But you want more. You want the Focals to agree unreservedly with every choice you make. We can’t do that.’
‘Fine,’ he snapped back in mounting fury. ‘Don’t.’
‘Fine,’ she repeated, as angry as he was now. ‘Just so we understand each other.’
They finished their preparations in dismal, furious silence. It was a sour note to end on after the serenity of Dawn’s funeral and the Saffids’ displays of devotion, however misguided. Tymon felt wretched, but could not bring himself to try to make amends to Noni a second time. Less than a quarter of an hour later, he was bidding farewell to the mineworkers, wishing them fair weather for their journey to the Spur, and from there on to the Freehold.
The skies over the Gap looked set to grant his request. Although the wind was sharp, the late morning sun warmed his shoulders through the copious Farhang travelling cloak, and the blue immensity above was unbroken. There had been no sign of the dreaded birds since he exited the mine, and he was beginning to think that he had chased them away for good. Even the pain in his muscles had subsided to a dull and manageable ache. All would have been quite satisfactory, indeed, had it not been for the unhappiness he saw stamped on Noni’s face. He told himself he could do nothing about that, and extended his hand to her in a last stiff courtesy before leaving. She shook it wordlessly.
It was with deep regret that he turned his back on her and trudged towards the ledge that led up to the tunnel. As he set foot on the narrow pathway, however, he realised that he was not alone. Zero had followed him.
‘What is it, my friend?’ he asked the lumbering young man.
When he had tried to say goodbye earlier, Zero had simply hung his head and refused to speak. He now looked sidelong at Tymon, like a child who catches an adult in a foolish act. ‘You forgot,’ he said, reproachful.
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