Vergence

by John March

  “Do you want something?” Sash asked.

  “Honourables, please excuse my rudeness,” the man said, bobbing his head. “My captain humbly requests all guests to return to cabins.”

  “Why?” Sash asked.

  “My captain wishes his honoured guests to be safe when we are landing.”

  “I think they need a clear deck to work while they're landing,” Ebryn said. “I guess it must be fairly tricky positioning something this large over one of those spaces.”

  Sash frowned and pursed her lips. “I really wanted to watch the landing. Oh, very well, if we must, I suppose we'll have to.”

  As they made their way back to the stairs a flock of small bird-like creatures swept up over the ship from underneath, screeching loudly and scattering droppings across the deck.

  The crewman made a hissing sound through his teeth. “Such pests–”

  “What are they?” Ebryn asked.

  “Do not be fearful,” the crewman said. “These are called leatherwing. Very messy — much cleaning.”

  Sash stopped at the top of the steps. “Whoever gets back up here first waits for the others before leaving.”

  Ebryn found Hui-ta and thanked him, before joining the passengers assembled at the disembarkation point on the upper deck. He found Quentyn already waiting, head bobbing up and down as he attempted to see past the small group surrounding him.

  Amongst the waiting passengers were some of those who had attended the captain's banquet the previous evening. Sash stood a short distance behind the others near the railing watching the activity below.

  Quentyn spotted him and rushed over.

  “Hmnn, ah, Ebryn,” he said loudly.

  “Master Quentyn?”

  “Now pay attention, Ebryn,” Quentyn said. “Your tests will be held on the last day before the Tranquillity, so you have a few days to improve, eh?”

  Ebryn nodded, wishing Quentyn wouldn't embarrass him in front of everyone they met. “Yes master Quentyn.”

  “After all, you're not his acknowledged heir now are you, hmm? I mean your just the same as us, so you need to make sure you practise to make a good impression,” Quentyn said. “I mean you aren't a Conant, eh? Your family name is Alire, not Conant.”

  There was a snort from beside them. Romain and his sister had approached unnoticed to join the group. “Alire. Funny name, isn’t it … a liar …”

  Ebryn flushed, but Quentyn continued without appearing to draw breath. “Hmmn, what you need to understand is you need to make your way like all of us. You must do well if you want to rise in the—”

  “Excuse me,” Sash said in a sharp tone, glaring at the back of Quentyn's head. “Ebryn, can you help me with this, please?”

  Ebryn quickly joined her in front of a large collection of boxes and cases, grateful for the respite.

  “He's insufferable. I don't know how you stand him,” she said quietly, leaning over to check the fastenings on a large wooden container. “It's a good thing he stayed in his cabin. It would have been tempting to push him overboard.”

  In spite of his embarrassment, he couldn't help smiling. “Thanks.”

  “Don't worry,” Sash said. “Whatever happens at the test, at least you won't have to put up with him much longer.”

  “Yes, I just hope there aren't too many more like him,” Ebryn said.

  Sash tugged on a buckle. “I'm sure they won't all be like him. Is this tight enough?”

  Ebryn pulled on the lid, but it stayed firmly in place. It formed a single piece with the whole container, attached at one side and flapping over with long straps to fasten to the other. The body was made of a well-crafted fine-grained wood, the upper half with rows of hundreds of tiny holes on all four sides. Finely wrought bronze had been used in thin strips to bind the base and fashioned to make wide handles at each end. Even to his untutored eye, the quality of workmanship stood out clearly.

  Most of the other containers scattered around Sash looked like they'd been made to the same design.

  “Are these all yours? You brought a lot with you,” Ebryn said.

  Sash eyed the assorted boxes and holdalls. “Not really. These are only a few of my things.”

  “A few? How by Collenar are you planning on carrying all of these to wherever you're staying?”

  “That's easy. Captain Lim offered to keep all of these over here in his guild strongroom until I know where I'm staying. Until then all I'm taking is that box, and this bag.”

  Ebryn ran his fingers over the surface of the box as a flight of dark leatherwings swept across the deck, chattering and screeching, releasing a random splattering of pearly droppings, and he felt something stir inside under his hand.

  He glanced at Sash. “Is there something alive in here?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yes … I brought my friend with me from home.”

  Ebryn lifted the wooden box a finger-span from the floor. It was much heavier than it looked, and the weight shifted abruptly as the thing inside moved.

  “You won't get this far without help. How are you planning on getting across the city?”

  “Addae will help, I'm sure. It's only one thing.”

  “What is it you want me to help you with?” Addae asked, emerging from amongst the other passengers.

  “You don't mind helping with carrying, do you?” Sash asked.

  Addae chuckled. “Sashael, do you want me to be your bearer?”

  “Just as far as the road. We should be able to hire a symor there — a kind of small cart. I have the name of a place we can stay, nearer where we want to be.”

  “You seem to have thought of everything,” Ebryn said, impressed.

  Sash shrugged. “I'm used to arranging things for myself.”

  When the ramp dropped they followed the main group of passengers at a distance as they made their way down to the ground. Ebryn could see the back of Quentyn's head bobbing along ahead of them.

  The walkway disgorged them into a mass of people on the terrace below the ship, and in moments Addae and Sash were the only ones around him that Ebryn recognised. He found the press immediately disorientating, pushing first in one direction, then another, like waves at the edge of the sea.

  Ebryn found himself floundering as people repeatedly stepped in his way. Despite his size, Addae seemed to struggle too. They quickly fell in behind Sash, who seemed to have no difficulty pushing a path through, as she made for a broad set of steps at the edge of the landing area.

  Vergence

  THE SYMOR TURNED OUT to be a lightweight contraption balanced on two wheels, like a shortened covered cart with space for passengers directly behind the driver, and a large open basket hanging off the rear for luggage. A number of these vehicles were lined up along the edge of the road.

  Harnessed in front of each, where Ebryn might have expected a pair of horses, was a single creature, very tall with long thin legs, hairless grey-brown reptilian skin, and a long angular hound-like heads. It had a set of three stubby horns positioned towards the rear of its skull in a fan-shaped cluster.

  Sash approached the nearest symor, but the driver waved them towards the front of the line.

  “Why must we take the one at the front? Why can’t we just choose the ones we want?” Sash asked.

  “It will be a matter of custom to be honoured,” Addae said.

  “So we don’t have any choice? But then they must accept whoever arrives first too?”

  “We have such a tradition amongst my people,” Addae said. “In the season of little water in the dry lands we have the solongo. When the people of many tribes must share water each must wait until those before have finished. And those who are before must leave the water in the morning after a day.”

  “How odd … nobody in Senesella would submit to something not of their own choosing. They would just take whichever symor they liked, and the driver would be free to refuse whoever he wished not to take.”

  “Without the solongo custom, the water would be lost to all, and
there would be fighting amongst the people over what remained,” Addae said.

  Sash laughed. “Nobody would fight for water in Senessela.”

  The symor at the head of the line was painted in faded colours, the contraption had a tired worn-out appearance. Its driver had some of the features of the Chochin, but taller and thinner. He wore a loose-fitting faded blue long-sleeved shirt and trousers, with a small square cap balanced on top of his head. He grinned at them as they approached, revealing a mouth full of black-stained teeth.

  “You want symor? Come, come, I take you.” He motioned toward the foot-step directly in front of the wheel. “Where you going?”

  Sash showed him the chit Captain Lim had given her, “We were told the Etched Man.”

  “Ah yes — etch man. Good, good, I take you,” he said.

  “What’s the charge?”

  “Three to go?” he said, holding up four grubby fingers and a thumb. “You pay five.”

  Sash produced a small coin and held it out for the driver to see. “Five like this?”

  “Five — yes,” he said, eyes fixed on the coin in Sash’s hand.

  The coin looked like an eighth guilder, not a huge sum, but five would easily feed a man for a day or two.

  “Is it far to the Etched Man?” Ebryn asked.

  “Far? Yes, is far.”

  Sash paid him and moved to the rear of the symor with Addae who helped load her bag and wooden container into the luggage holdall. Ebryn was grateful he and Addae were carrying nothing with them. Although Sash had left nearly all her belongings on the deck of the world-ship there was still barely enough space in the rack for what she had brought with her.

  While Addae wedged the largest box carefully into place, and Sash made anxious noises about not blocking the breathing hole, Ebryn moved over to the three-horned creature at the front of the symor, and laid a hand on its shoulder.

  “What kind of creature is this?” Ebryn asked.

  “He called trikawi,” the driver said. “Strong, very strong. Very good.”

  To Ebryn the trikawi looked fascinating, and he didn't recall seeing it in any of the bestiaries he'd read. Unlike the hairy warmth of a horse, the skin was smooth and leathery, and cool to the touch. Wiry muscles rippled under his hand as the trikawi leant away from him in its harness.

  Ebryn focussed inside himself for a moment, searching for the calm point and allowing it to flow outwards through his hands, pouring out the same instinctive force he used to calm horses and angry dogs.

  The trikawi’s head looped round on its long neck like a striking serpent, and snapped at his hand. Unlike the blunt instruments of a horse, its teeth were pointed at the front and sharp, with large outward facing canines. Ebryn barely managed to pull his fingers out of the way, stepping backwards quickly.

  “Har, har,” the old driver bent over, holding the side of his vehicle and laughing loudly. “He eat your finger. You pay in coin, eh, no pay with finger.”

  When they were seated, the driver made a clucking sound, and the trikawi set off at a fast pace. The strength of the creature was incredible. It accelerated to a fast trot with ease, and even accounting for the lightness of the symor, Ebryn calculated they would need at least two horses to pull the same load at speed.

  Sash sat squeezed between Ebryn and Addae, and wriggled constantly to get a better view of the passing city. If it had been anybody else sitting next to him Ebryn would have found the fidgeting annoying, but with Sash the excitement caught them all. She seemed to glow, reminding him of the expressions on the faces of the children in Conant village the one year he'd been there when the travelling fair arrived.

  The symor wove between slower moving wagons and carriages, ranging freely across the breadth of the road. They passed through some openings with barely a finger's width clearance on either side and both he and Addae gripped the forward hand rail, flinching as they swept through seemingly impossible spaces. Neither the driver or Sash seemed at all concerned by the seemingly endless series of hazardous obstacles, and narrow gaps the roadway threw up in their path.

  They followed the line of the terrace towards the centre of Vergence, but about a third of a mile along turned left, and crossed over a long bridge spanning the wide valley floor below. On the near side a rotund world-ship unfurled a vast rust-coloured sail with an audible crack and lurched ponderously into the air, but Ebryn's attention was drawn to the far edge of the valley. What he had taken to be the narrowly terraced sides of a steep rise proved, on closer inspection, to be a virtual cliff-face of dwellings piled one on top of the other.

  The sheer scale of the structures dwarfed the senses. He barely had time to digest the monumental architecture before the symor plunged into a space between two rows of buildings — a gloomy artificial gorge filled with jostling traffic moving in both directions. They quickly turned down a side path and another, and within moments Ebryn had completely lost his sense of direction.

  The layered sounds and odours of the city enveloped them. The noise reminded him of standing under the eaves of a forest as a storm raged around; an indistinguishable background roar filled in with a thousand sharper details closer at hand.

  Between the tightly packed buildings the din reverberated, echoing from the walls and rolling back into the space between. But unlike his experience of the storm-racked Goresyn woods, which he'd found exhilarating, here he found the overlapping sounds disorientating.

  The stink of the city in the confined space was almost worse than the noise. Fire smoke mingled uncompromisingly with the sour smell of cooking food competing for supremacy with the pungent aroma of animal dung.

  All around, he felt as if thousands of eyes watched them pass, although he knew passers-by were simply going about their business. Ebryn sat back, and closed his eyes to shut out the assault on his senses. When he opened them again they were heading down a sloping lane.

  The trikawi broke into a rapid canter, and the symor started to bounce alarmingly along the uneven stonework. Despite the ominous rasping of distressed metal and wood coming from the vehicle, their driver leant forward, making clicking noises with his tongue, attempting to spur it on to go even faster.

  When Ebryn opened his eyes, they were in a broad avenue. At the far end two tall pillars bracketed the road, as if marking some kind of boundary. In front of each pillar stood a handful of guards in uniforms.

  Beyond the pillars was a huge area, open to the sky, blanketed with rows of awnings and crammed to the point of overflowing. Hundreds of brightly coloured pennons fluttered overhead, attached to the ends of long poles.

  Thousands of people crowded the space beneath, with a noise like the sound of a rushing of a water, growing louder as they approached. It took him a few seconds to realise that the noise came from the huge crowd, jostling and calling to each other beneath the market covers.

  “Look at it, isn't it wonderful,” Sash said. “It's even greater than I thought it would be.”

  Ebryn found he barely had time to look at anything for more than a moment before it was snatched away by the pressing crowd and the movement of the symor.

  A ragged clothed man carrying a wooden bowl was shoved roughly away from the market by a guard using the blunt end of a spear.

  Another dressed in long robes, with a shaven head and long straggling beard, clutched at a heavy tome like a drowning man. He screamed wild-eyed and incoherent exhortations at passers-by, flecks of white spittle flying at every other word.

  The trikawi pulling them snapped irritably at the backs of a group of tall men in flat-topped brown felt hoods as they hurried out of the way. The closed expressions on the mens' olive-skinned faces yielded no hint of their thoughts.

  A short way into the market they fell in behind a wagon, where the trikawi's fangs could no longer make an impression on the throngs blocking the road, and the symor slowed to a walking pace.

  The overwhelming numbers, the welter of different styles and colours, seemed to crush Ebryn's senses. H
e felt insignificant in the face of such a heaving mass of people. On the other side of the symor he could see an expression of something like disbelief on Addae's face. Sash, however, seemed to be transported.

  From all around them Ebryn could hear traders calling above the noise as they hawked their goods. At least, he thought, a few things stayed the same, regardless of where you were.

  On his side of the vehicle a group of short tryth dressed in bright multicoloured clothing gambolled around an elevated platform. The crowd surrounding them whistled and laughed appreciatively as one of the small, toad-like entertainers tripped over a trailing ribbon and tumbled into a group of his fellows.

  Ebryn watched them with interest, his first opportunity since the world-ship to see anvolene up close.

  Master Spetimane had taught him the word volene, meaning “like us” in old Volanian. In the past, he'd said, the word anvolene had been used to describe those with six limbs, such as the cheg, but later it came to mean any group distinctly different to the Volanians.

  The tryth were just over half the height of a typical man, with solid muscular bodies. Heavily folded mottled grey skin covered most of their bodies, and their heads looked like toads, with pointed ears, and broad mouths filled with sharp teeth.

  “I want to stop and have a look,” Sash said, leaning forward, and speaking loudly to their driver.

  The man shook his head. “We no stop here.”

  Sash considered for a moment. “If you'll stop I'll pay you extra.”

  “You pay three? We stop short short time.”

  “Yes, that's fine,” Sash said.

  The symor stopped and Ebryn clambered out, followed by Sash, but Addae remained in his seat.

  “Don't you want to come and have a look?” Sash asked.

  “I will wait here,” Addae said. “It would be wise to stay and guard your baggage.”

  “Oh, that's good of you, if you don't mind,” Sash said. “I promise we won't be long. I just want a quick look.”

  Sash pushed through gaps in the crowds, heading towards a set of awnings visible over the heads of the people around them.