Oracle's Fire

by Mary Victoria

  Someone further down the cabin suddenly let out a stream of invective. ‘To hell with them all!’ he yelled. ‘A total waste! Give me one reason for it!’

  Bolas was not sure whether his companion’s fury was directed at the Nurians or the Saint, but he shared it fully when he remembered how his leg had been crushed under the falling deck beams of his ship, after a cask of Treesap wine exploded at the soldiers’ celebrations.

  During the course of that afternoon, as Bolas turned and twisted miserably in his hammock, he heard many such curses and cries of condemnation. He also heard rumours about the cause of the accident and its consequences. One was that the wine cask had been rigged up with blast-poison by a bunch of Jays intent on disrupting the crusade, though why Jays should care about such things was a mystery; they had never meddled in the Saint’s affairs before. Another was that they were all trapped in this choking hole of a fly-infested colony because the captain was waiting for paperwork transferring the Jays from the Marak jail to their ship, before setting sail for Argos. And a third rumour was circulating that the person who tipped the Argosians off about the Jays was a blond-haired Nurian claiming to be an enemy of the Freeholders. His name was Caro, and he had sent his condolences to the wounded soldiers.

  ‘Curse him!’ bellowed a voice at the far end of the cabin. ‘You can’t trust a white maggot further than a corpse. I bet he set the whole thing up himself, this Caro.’

  The Tree knew what was true. But then, one only entertained rumours for lack of more congenial company, thought Bolas bitterly. To find himself trapped like this among the idiots who had been carousing on deck the night before, singing their stupid songs to the Saint, and who were now bellowing and bawling with pain, was an irony he did not appreciate. He had avoided these men from the day he had been press-ganged onto the ship, preferring to polish hardwood spears rather than participate in their Tree-forsaken party. And now, he was imprisoned in their company for the duration of their journey home. Without a leg. It was too much!

  ‘Oh, mother!’ groaned the feeble voice from the hammock beside him. ‘Take me home!’

  Bolas finally glanced towards it, and saw a boy lying in the bloody hammock to his right. The kid was about fifteen, and had no arms. He was evidently suffering horribly. From the flush in his cheeks and the way he tossed his head back and forth, Bolas guessed he might be delirious. He craned his neck to look in the direction of the door, but there was no nurse in sight. The hospice boat was overcrowded, and the few female assistants who had come from Argos, to do the laundry and keep the medical supplies clean, were hard-pressed to keep up with their multiple duties.

  The boy was moaning again. ‘Mother, mother —’ he began.

  But their neighbour to the left, the one who had already called the boy a nut-head, interrupted him. ‘Ow shut up, yer silly sod!’ the man growled in a choked voice. Bolas noticed that his head was entirely wrapped in gauze. ‘You’d have a different song to sing if your face was blown away like mine,’ he muttered.

  Bolas shuddered and looked back out of the portholes. The boy without arms continued whimpering. Bolas no longer noticed him, absorbed in his own misery and trembling with shooting pains that rose from his missing knee. He had to bite his lips to avoid crying out, and had reached the point where he could barely hold back tears of self-pity, when the doors of the cabin opened and the ship’s surgeon entered.

  Doctor Swallow had no tolerance with maudlin patients. He was a tough old bird, and had seen worse than the wounded he was currently tending. When the soldiers moaned about the loss of their limbs, he invariably reminded them of the number of dead that had been tipped over the side of the ship after the explosion.

  ‘So be thankful you’re around to feel anything,’ he trumpeted, as he stomped through the ward on his rounds.

  Bolas wondered, with rising irritation, why Swallow felt obliged to place each foot down so heavily when he walked around the cabin.

  ‘If you haven’t been blown apart by blast-poison, then gangrene or fly fever will probably do it,’ Swallow barked at the poor man on Bolas’ left, the one without a face.

  You would think he was paid to cure his patients of their hopes rather than their wounds, thought Bolas angrily, as the surgeon approached his hammock.

  ‘As long as you’re still in pain, you know you’re in tip-top shape,’ Swallow announced to him, before passing on to the boy without arms.

  Bolas noted, grimly, that the surgeon did not have anything to say to the youth who continued to call for his mother. He knew Swallow was right, and that he had been lucky to escape with his life, but as the Treesap wine wore off and the pain in his absent leg grew worse, Bolas was becoming more and more conscious of those around him, and less and less thankful as a result.

  ‘If blast-poison and gangrene don’t do it,’ Nell would have reprimanded him, ‘then anger will.’

  The memory of her sweet voice was all that kept him from screaming aloud in pain and despair. Thank the Tree he still had arms to hold her! If he survived this, he vowed, it would only be to see Nell again. Nothing else mattered.

  It was late that night when the armless youth finally stopped raving. His incessant cries had provoked a storm of protest around the ward. He had been told to hold his tongue or the Saint would cut it out; he had been invited to dive in the Gap and get lost; he had been urged to go bury himself in Nurian manure; and finally there was an appeal, by the faceless man on Bolas’ other side, that he might just please hurry up and die, so they could all sleep a little. This last request the boy appeared inclined to obey, though he was oblivious to the rest. For delirium had set in. It was only after the harassed nurse had changed his dressings and administered a dose of something to calm the boy, which she confessed to Bolas was a little stronger than wine and not strictly on the record, that silence finally filled the ward.

  The youth’s calm might have been ominous, but the other patients were grateful for it. There was a chorus of faint cheers all round and the faceless man was soon snoring noisily through the gap in his bandages. Despite the nightcap he too had been given, however, Bolas found himself fidgeting restlessly in his hammock as the moon rose outside the portholes. It was difficult to lie in the same position for hours, unbearable to be rolled up in this cocoon without being able to move. But when he tried to find a comfortable position on his opposite side, the pain was so piercing that he gave an involuntary groan.

  There was a shift in the silence. He heard something, the trace of a sound that had coincided with his own. Had he roused the armless boy? Would the cripple now begin his endless babbling again? Bolas lay rigid, until the waves of his own pain subsided, listening to the laboured breath of his sleeping companions. They were all like some huge animal extended across different bodies, breathing through separate mouths, struggling through individual dreams, but feeling one common pain. For the first time since he had joined their company, he felt a kinship with the wounded soldiers around him, a deepening compassion. They were just grown-up babies, most of them, hardly weaned before they had been thrust into this war. Perhaps the lad had called out in a nightmare; perhaps he was simply missing his mother. Whatever the sound was, Bolas decided he had better check on him.

  Inching himself up on his shaking arms and doing his utmost to avoid putting pressure on the bleeding stump of his left leg, he leaned over carefully in his swaying hammock to look down on his companion. The armless youth was lying in a shaft of moonlight with his eyes wide open.

  ‘Did you hear it too?’ he breathed.

  Bolas’ heart was in his mouth. The boy was as pale as a ghost already.

  ‘It’s a kind of singing,’ said the boy, staring at Bolas. ‘Listen!’

  And as he spoke, Bolas heard it. A faint chanting came from somewhere deep in the bowels of the ship. It was neither a noise of protest nor of pain. It was not a crying or a moaning or a wailing or a curse. It was a steady, joyful, daunting song.

  I pass the torch to you, my love.<
br />
  Fly fast and free, for you’re my messenger.

  Set the world alight or be consumed, my love.

  Either be the torch or burn away.

  Bolas realised he had been holding his breath. ‘The Jays!’ he murmured, in sudden understanding. ‘Must be the prisoners everyone was talking about. What are they singing?’

  The armless boy looked up at him, washed white as a shrouded corpse in the moonlight. ‘The words of the Nurian prophet,’ he said softly, as the chant went on, gradually swelling around them in the listening dark.

  I pass the torch to you, my love.

  Bolas shuddered. ‘How do you know that?’ he asked.

  Fly fast and free, for you’re my messenger.

  ‘I remember her,’ said the boy, half to himself. ‘The one the Saint had executed, before he started killing us.’

  Bolas stared at him. So young and yet so truthful? He had not imagined soldiers could be honest, but pain did strange things to the human spirit.

  My story will change hearts, my love.

  How arrogant he had been, thought Bolas, and how judgmental of these lads! He was no less stubborn than the Saint’s crusaders. His eyes began to sting.

  ‘Hush!’ whispered the sick boy as the chant continued, ‘listen!’

  Don’t be blinded by your own desires.

  Whether because of the shame he felt to be weeping again, or the shaking of his arms which could no longer sustain his weight, Bolas was obliged to lower himself back into his hammock as the song of the Jays continued.

  For this is the Year of Fire, the beginning and the end.

  As the last wave of the chant dissolved into silence, the voice of the armless boy washed clear as moonlight through the ward.

  ‘You will tell my mother I never killed a man, won’t you?’ he said distinctly.

  When Bolas had the courage to heave himself up from the hammock and look down at the youth again, he saw that he was dead.

  The Jay prisoners, who had been arrested in Marak some days before the wine cask accident, provided the wounded soldiers with their permit to return home on the morrow. While the remaining Argosian vessels headed off to Farhang under the direction of Admiral Greenly, Aran, the captain of the hospice ship, gave orders for their ether sacs to be filled, too. With every hammock in the sick bay taken and the hold stuffed with Jays, there was no need to wait for further casualties from the war with the Freehold.

  But as it turned out, their departure was delayed due to a bureaucratic setback. The hospice ship failed its hygiene inspection at the last minute because of two more dead bodies found on board. One of the Jay prisoners, who had been fatally hurt during their arrest, had expired in the hold the same night as the armless soldier died of his wounds upstairs. And so the hospice ship was denied sanitation clearance until the corpses could be tossed into Marak Harbour.

  There was a considerable brouhaha about it. No one cared about the Jay, who could hardly be called a casualty of the Saint’s war, but the Argosian boy’s body ought to be kept on board, according to his wounded comrades, until he could be given a hero’s funeral in the Gap. Being blown up by a cask of Treesap wine was just as good as martyrdom in a crusade, after all, and an Argosian from the Central Canopy deserved better than to be thrown overboard in Marak.

  Bolas was sickened when he heard of it. How idiotic to impose the prejudices of the living on the bodies of the dead! As if oblivion recognised one nation over another, he thought in disgust. As if the canopies had a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ side. He had the impression that the two deaths were linked, somehow, for he guessed the songs he and the Argosian boy had been listening to had been sung for the Jay who died. Bolas felt responsibility for both young men, and wished to be present at their last rites. But Swallow refused to let him witness the brief ceremony. He lay in miserable pain in his hammock below deck as the two fragile biers were slipped ignominiously overboard, the Saint’s soldier and the Impure Jay united in death.

  His one source of comfort, when they finally did set sail from Marak, was the songs of the prisoners in the hold. The remaining Jays kept singing throughout that day and the days after, their voices hauntingly beautiful. Despite the poignant melodies, however, the wounded soldiers took exception to this fresh assault on their ears. They grumbled, then cursed. Swallow complained on medical grounds, and Aran stomped down to the hold, telling the prisoners to be quiet on pain of punishment. But the Jays continued, singing quietly at night when the drugged soldiers slept, instead of in the daytime. Bolas was grateful to them for not obeying.

  Had it not been for their sweet chanting, his bitterness would have deepened, for the deaths did not end in Marak Harbour. The man with his face blown off, and another youth no older than Bolas, who had lost one leg to blast-poison and the other to gangrene, were tipped overboard two days later, during the Gap crossing. Now that, agreed the wounded men in their hammocks, was the way to go: much better than being shoved out in the colonies. But Bolas missed those funerals, too. He was suffering from a slight fever at the time, and was banned from going above deck. Swallow had no patience with men who threw their lives away when he had gone to the trouble of saving them.

  So Bolas missed seeing the Gap, even on one leg. He had witnessed the cloudy expanse briefly on the way over to Marak, but had not had time to appreciate its awful beauty because of turbulence during the first crossing. He had been too busy climbing up and down ladders, and lashing down cargo on that occasion, to use his eyes. On the way back, the weather was fair and calm, with no funnel-winds between the layers of conflicting cloud. The dirigible drifted across the fleecy immensity with a clear, blue sky overhead, while the Jays kept singing. Bolas only caught a glimpse of the cloudy Void through the portholes.

  They had barely touched down in the Central Canopy, docking for the night at a postal relay on the other side of the Gap, when they were overtaken by unexpected and disturbing news. The gaunt-faced monk who manned the bird-station had received new messages from Marak that very afternoon: the Argosian fleet had suffered an unforeseen defeat in Farhang, he informed Aran colourlessly. Scores had been killed under the relentless air-sniping of the United Freeholds, and the fleet forced to retreat and regroup, according to the clipped hand of a certain Sergeant Pumble. Bolas was devastated rather than relieved by the news, for he knew well enough that the Saint had hundreds more young lives to waste at his disposal. Defeat would only lead to further reprisals. The war would go on, and on: there was no chance of the Nurians ultimately winning it, and every likelihood that generations of Argosians would be warped by it. He was heartsick at the thought.

  But even after this dreadful news, the Jays kept singing. And as Bolas pondered over the setback suffered by the Saint’s armies, the words of their chant began to echo with a new resonance in his ears. He began to suspect that these circus performers had been arrested precisely because of their songs.

  Before you, armies lay their arms to rest

  And ravening beasts learn gentleness.

  Three days after the Gap crossing, Bolas’ fever had abated, and his strength was beginning to return. Despite the phantom pain in his thigh, he had made sufficient progress to be able to practise walking up and down the ward on a crutch. But he had still not been permitted on deck, and was heartily sick of being cooped up inside the cabin. The hospice ship was making good headway, in steady, southwesterly winds; with his voyage almost half-over, the prospects of seeing Nell were starting to make the young architect restless. The thought had crossed his mind — with a twinge of shame, for he had no cause to think her so fickle — that his sweetheart might not love a cripple with only one leg. The idea made him desperate, and he was determined not to meet her lying on a stretcher. He wanted to be as well as possible, as strong as possible, by the time he reached Argos city, and resolved to ask the surgeon for his walking papers that very day, come what may.

  It was not to be, however. Late that afternoon, approaching the Cape of Green Hope and withi
n sight of the Lantrian leaf-table, the weather took a change for the worse. Bolas was just gathering up the courage to ask Swallow, the next time he appeared on his rounds, if he might spend an evening on deck, when a violent storm hit the ship, out of the blue. The southern climate had been mild for days; there had even been a hint of spring in the air. But all at once, a furious gale leapt out of a clear sky, and the dirigible began to pitch and toss, its ether sacks straining.

  The three blasts of the emergency horn put paid to Bolas’ hopes of going outside. He listened with gloomy frustration from his hammock as Aran’s voice drifted down from above, shouting frantic orders to batten down the hatches, lash the sails and drop anchor. The able-bodied men on the ship deserted the cabins, occupied with coaxing the ship down into the lower twigs. After a while, the shouts receded, and there was only the wind pummelling the dirigible’s hull, shaking it like a dried leaf. The wounded men in the hammocks next to Bolas were silent, stunned into rare submission by the noise.

  It went on for what seemed like hours, a howling, whistling gale interspersed by distant booming, as if whole sections of the Tree were crashing into each other. At long last, the fury of the gale ebbed away to a degree, though the ship still shook spasmodically, and far-off booms continued to echo through the hull. Another faint sound could also be heard, rising over the whistling wind.

  Ye are the wind that carries forth the flame.

  Before you, cities crumble, hearts are changed.

  The Jays were still singing. No one had bothered to silence them during the storm, occupied with the business of safety and survival. Even Swallow had been press-ganged into active service, as Aran called it, and was nowhere to be seen. Bolas cast a rapid glance over the other hammocks in the ward, swaying with the ship. Surely no one would notice in the midst of this crisis if he, too, broke a few rules. No one would care what he was doing at a time like this, he thought, tipping his one leg carefully onto the floor. He balanced precariously as he groped for his crutch. It was hanging on a hook nearby, and he almost fell, reaching for it. Even if he could not go up on deck, perhaps he could make his way downstairs and talk with the prisoners in the hold.