‘Sometimes,’ said the man, nodding in the direction of the pilgrims, ‘appearances can be deceiving.’
The boy was unnerved. He salvaged his pride with a shrug. It was bad enough to be confronted with the tribute workers. He was not about to allow himself to be sermonised on the subject by a vagabond.
‘What’s it to you?’ he muttered.
‘I speak only as a fellow traveller,’ replied the tramp with gentle courtesy. ‘We all have need of a friend in strange places.’
Tymon squinted at him in the dim light of the tunnel. The vagrant’s manner was gracious, at odds with his rags. He wondered if this was some trick to solicit money.
‘That’s true, I suppose,’ he allowed, cautiously. ‘I have to go now. Good luck to you.’ He moved towards the postern gate.
‘Wait a moment, if you please.’
The mild request was irresistible. Tymon hesitated.
‘It’s a pity to leave without being introduced.’ The prisoner smiled at him through the bars, a flash of white teeth. ‘Who are you, young sir?’
‘I’m—I’m a novice at the seminary,’ stammered Tymon. He was reluctant to give his name to a vagrant.
‘In this case the clothes really do make the man,’ laughed the other. ‘I knew that from the cut of your tunic. But it doesn’t answer my question. Who are you?’
‘My name is Tymon,’ the boy answered warily.
‘Again, I did not ask your name, though I thank you for the confidence,’ said the man. ‘I asked who you were.’
Tymon stared at him. He felt unable to speak. The beggar leaned forward eagerly, as if the answer to that one question were the most important thing in the world. His face caught a ray of light from the mouth of the tunnel; the boy saw that his right cheek was disfigured by an angry red scar. He shivered. He was spared the embarrassment of response, however. Just then, soldiers emerged from the guards’ quarters in a blast of raucous merriment, slamming the door behind them.
‘You. choir-rat,’ cried one of them. ‘You’re in the way. Get out of there!’
Tymon stepped hastily away from the wagon. A soldier vaulted into the driver’s seat and sent his long whip curling over the backs of the packbeasts. He ignored the prisoner. The vehicle began creaking through the tunnel towards the gate and the docks. The remaining soldiers marched before it and unlocked one of the great doors to the air harbour; it swung open, groaning on its hinges. The vaulted passage filled with a sudden wash of sunlight. As the cavalcade rattled through the opening the stranger lifted his hand to Tymon, a silent gesture of farewell. The boy did not wave back. At that very moment he had been gripped by the distinct, unpleasant sensation that someone else was watching him from behind. He spun around towards the market end of the tunnel. There, to his alarm, he made out an imposing figure dressed in green.
The Dean! Tymon shrank back against the wall of the vault for the second time, his heart beating. He could see Father Fallow and several members of his retinue approaching down the main causeway, accompanied by a bowing, scraping young priest in missionary robes. The Head of the College kept his colleagues under strict control and his subordinates in a constant state of nervous anticipation; the last thing Tymon wanted was to be caught by him out in the city during morning prayers, and talking to a convicted felon, besides. The act would certainly be classed as Impure. Too late, Masha’s warnings came flooding back. He hugged the long shadows of the tunnel and ducked through the air-harbour gate after the wagon, obsessed by a single thought. He must not be seen.
The covered cart turned to the right on the docks, rolling away along the boardwalk. The canvas awning had slipped over the bars. Tymon hastened in the opposite direction, eastwards, towards the trunk-face. Where the quays met the wall of bark, he followed a terraced ramp that wound up the Tree like a wriggling wormhole. Soon he had left the air-harbour far below. He climbed alone up the deserted road, an ant on the monstrous expanse of the trunk. The ramp doubled back on itself, angling back and forth along the wall. With each northward bend, a slit in the bark came further into prominence, revealing at last a gaping black hole. Whether out of long habit, or some instinct of self-preservation, the boy again avoided raising his eyes to the Mouth. He never stopped or looked behind him until he reached one of the minor branches sprouting above the city. Here the way divided. The ramp continued on, zigzagging upwards until it lost itself in the leaf-forests above. The lesser limb was about half a mile long and grew perpendicular to the trunk, extending almost horizontally to Tymon’s right. A dusty track threaded along its upper ridge. He stopped at the intersection to catch his breath. The slopes of the branch were carved into neat terraces filled with loam, supporting rows of green barley vine. Birds wheeled in the dizzy space beyond.
Only then did he realise that he had failed to return the beggar’s gesture. He had been too concerned with saving himself to say goodbye. The detail made him feel obscurely ashamed, as if he had insulted a saint instead of a nameless tramp. The whole encounter in the gate-tunnel—the arrival of the pilgrims, the conversation with the man in the cart—had left a sour aftertaste in his mouth. The sentiment was ridiculous, he reasoned: he had troubles of his own. He had been right to leave before the Dean noticed him. In any case, he had better things to do that morning than waste his time on slaves and vagrants. Having resolved the matter on a rational level, at least, he set off down the little used track along the branch ridge. The whispering green vines closed about him and he was completely hidden from view.
2
Tymon followed the track along the limb for about half a mile until it wound up a knot and left the barleyvine terraces behind. When he had climbed high enough over the green rows he stopped to look about him. There was no sign of movement on the main road up the trunk. The Tree seemed empty of life except for blackbirds, perched like sentinels along the vine-frames. To his right, the terraces ceased abruptly where the limb curved under and gave way to the gulf. The topmost tier of Argos city lay about two hundred feet below. The cry of merchants and vendors in the streets and the shouts of the sailors on the air-harbour quays carried upwards on the warm breeze. Tymon could see the roofs of the Priests’ Quarter from where he stood. The polished hardwood dome of the temple Hall dominated the rest, shaped like the closed petals of a flower. Behind it rose the bell-tower, a thin, tapering construction like a needle, built in the more austere style of the founding fathers of Argos. The bells inside were said to be made of sacred hardwood, carved from the heart of the world. Certainly, no other carillon rang out as sweet, or could be heard as far away. As the boy lingered on the knot, the bells struck seven times, solemnly pronouncing the hour. Morning prayer would be under way in the Hall. Everything seemed pleasant, and busy, and right.
All things in their proper place.
The pilgrims’ song grated in Tymon’s memory. He exorcised the foreigners’ ghostly white faces with an effort of will, and continued on up the knot. A tumbledown bark-brick wall now ran parallel to the path. Around a sharp bend he came within sight of a ramshackle windmill, half-ruined, its courtyard overgrown with creepers. But the sackcloth sails were still turning and the workshop was in use. In the yard lay a multitude of broken and unnameable objects, spare parts and half-finished gadgets. A continuous sound of whistling and various thumping and hooting noises came from inside the workshop, as if some huge, alien bird were kept prisoner there. The boy picked his way between the piles of debris towards the cacophony.
‘Father Galliano!’ he called out. ‘I’ve come! It’s Tymon. I have lunch!’
Immediately the thumping died down, though the whistling noise continued in the background. The bent brown figure of an old man appeared in the workshop doorway, wiping his hands on a sooty apron. His beard was also spotted with soot and he wore an ancient, mangled cap with flaps that hung down over his ears. Underneath the apron could still be seen what remained of a green robe, tucked into a pair of sackcloth breeches. He hurried towards Tymon, gesturing wildly in
his excitement.
‘I’ve done it!’ he cried. ‘Come and see, boy! This is a great day, a great day!’
Father Jonas Galliano was technically no longer a priest. He had been stripped of that title and position over ten years ago by the Priests’ Council for espousing heretical beliefs; the College kept him on a meagre pension out of charity. He was considered mad by most people, though they still called him ‘Father’, or the more familiar ‘Apu’, out of habit. His ideas on cosmology were eccentric. He believed that the Void was divine, not the Tree: he proposed that the infinite universe contained other Trees, and that these worlds also supported life. To the dismay of the Argosians he maintained that gravity was a mathematical, not mystical force, and that Hell had a physical mass, attracting all bodies downwards. Such blasphemous notions had cost him his livelihood. To compound his disgrace, the old man made an obstinate pursuit of invention—‘As if,’ concerned citizens lamented, ‘the Saints and Fathers hadn’t already provided us with everything we needed, and every device we could ever use.’ Since this fault seemed incurable, Galliano had been left to court damnation in peace, at least until now.
Tymon’s ostensible reason for visiting the workshop was to carry out his charity duty for the seminary. The scientist was not considered so far gone in heresy that contact with the wider community was denied him, and the visits were far more pleasurable than the other options available on the students’ duty roster. The boy had been bringing lunch to Galliano several times a week for the past five years. Though he had no use for physics and understood nothing about cosmology, he found the old man’s company refreshing. To a novice surrounded by rules and regulations, irreverence was a welcome break. Galliano’s enthusiasm was infectious. This week he had been promised a surprise by his friend, something, the scientist claimed, that would be ‘his inheritance’. Tymon speculated whether Galliano had somehow against all reason obtained an introduction for him at the Guild Fair.
He found himself being dragged into the workshop behind the inventor without further ado. He was barely able to shove his packet of food onto a nearby table before being propelled into the centre of a whirling cloud of soot, steam and heat. A makeshift furnace occupied the middle of the workshop. Over it hung several hardwood vats, their covers half-off, belching steam. A bevy of pipes connected the vats to a strange construction—a reinforced barrel equipped with a set of large pistons and a valve. It was from this that the continuous whistling came. Galliano set about covering the vats and using a pair of enormous bellows on the fire. The valve’s whistle mounted in pitch and the pistons began to move. Faster and faster they pumped, till all movement was blurred and the valves screamed. The old man danced about, shouting to Tymon inaudibly through the din, his face ecstatic. The boy laughed back, more at his friend’s antics than from any comprehension of his invention. At length the scientist uncovered the vats and allowed the pistons to slow down. His stream of talk gradually became audible as the thumping and whistling died away.
‘…major breakthrough in science,’ he cried, finishing his unheard speech with gusto, ‘the likes of which has not been seen in Argos since we first harnessed Tree-ether! Aye, we’ll do more than float the greatships now!’ He stopped, beaming and sweating, and raised his hands to the heavens dramatically. ‘Boy, we are no longer at the mercy of wind! We have entered the Age of Steam!’
Tymon looked at the squat contraption and its assortment of pipes with a cynical eye. Was this, then, to be his ‘inheritance’? It seemed quite useless and he was at a loss as to how the noisy, belching artefact could ever replace a greatship. But he refrained from dampening the old man’s joy.
‘It’s grand, Apu,’ he said. ‘What are we going to do with it?’
‘Do? Do?! Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said?’ exclaimed Galliano. ‘We’re going to build a new kind of dirigible! An air-chariot—it’ll go without wind and float without ether. You’ll see!’
Tymon brushed this aside in disbelief. ‘Surely a dirigible wouldn’t float without ether?’ he objected. ‘How would it sail?’
‘Like I say, the power of steam. The pistons will turn the propellers so fast that the craft will rise up into the air like a hummingbird. We’ll fly faster and further than any wind-powered dirigible! This is the invention that sets us free!’
‘But isn’t it heresy to sail faster than the wind, Apu?’ Tymon grinned. ‘Aren’t you worried Storm-demons will snatch you out of the air?’
‘Aha! There we have the crux of the matter!’ The scientist almost leaped into the air himself in his enthusiasm. ‘What you call Storm-demons, I call gravity, boy. The force generated by the propellers will exactly counterbalance the pull of gravity. You don’t still believe it’s the weight of your sins making you fall, do you? It’s time you grew out of such superstitions.’
‘I never believed in that sort of thing, anyway.’ Tymon bridled.
And it was close to being true. He was neither young enough to be frightened of fables nor old enough to be wary of reality. Religion was a matter of tradition and identity in Argos, rather than personal belief. There existed a gap between what was taught at the seminary and the practical reality accepted by Tymon’s fellows, who were well aware that a literal Hell did not lie among the roots of the World Tree, just as the sun and moon did not hang on its branches. The students sneered in adolescent superiority at the Rites, but were eager to avail themselves of the benefits they would bring. It was a given that any boy with spirit would do his best to contravene the legion of petty rules imposed by the priests. Rebellion was accorded its own rigidly defined place. With Bolas’ collusion, Tymon knew that he had three hours before he would be missed at the seminary; the time seemed long and the crumbs of liberty intoxicating.
‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you build your heresy, Apu.’
‘Good then,’ replied Galliano. ‘We start construction today. Where did I put my sketchleaf?’
They decided to assemble the air-chariot in the workshop yard, as the weather was fine. The first hour of Tymon’s freedom was spent cutting wood for the transverse beams on the craft. He breathed in the fresh air of the spring morning and thought with satisfaction of the other novices cramped inside the temple at prayers. By the second hour, as his classmates hoed the seminary gardens, the outline of the machine’s barkwood skeleton had taken shape on the floor of the yard. Now that Galliano’s creation was materialising before his eyes, he found himself won over to the old man’s thinking. The fact of having access to a flying machine, however unusual its shape and method of propulsion, appealed greatly to him. The third hour of his liberty came and went and he forgot about the passage of time, about the students at the seminary collecting their readers and trudging off to class. He thought no more about his fellows, absorbed in his work with the scientist.
When hunger finally distracted the two of them from their task, Galliano permitted a break. They perched on the tumbledown wall and surveyed their creation through mouthfuls of Nell’s roast bird. The machine would be clinker-built in the style of a light dirigible, with one important modification: in the place of ether sacks, it would have a hardwood propeller over the cockpit to lift it into the air. Later, they would add another propeller to the tail for steering. A thousand happy fantasies drifted through Tymon’s mind. The air-chariot would allow him to realise his hopes. He would leave with Galliano to embark on a life of wild adventure. There would be no more rules, no rituals, no indentured service looming at the end of his schooling. He would return from his travels with boxes of costly Tree-spice, and pay off his debt to the College in one triumphant gesture. He pictured himself presenting a roll of delicate silk paper to the Dean, who forgave him everything. Nell would be impressed.
‘Apu,’ he asked presently, ‘where do you want to go in the machine?’
Galliano eyed Tymon critically. Still more of a child than a man, despite all their Rites, he thought. ‘Well,’ he observed aloud, ‘after initial tests a
re done, when it’s fully safe, I suppose we could take it for a turn around the leaf-forests. Nothing to destroy when we fall down, eh?’
‘No, I mean, once it’s all tested and we know it flies perfectly, where do you want to travel to? Lantria?’
‘Lantria? Why?’ snorted Galliano. ‘You could go there in an ordinary dirigible. No, I have something more interesting in mind, boy.’
‘Like what?’ Tymon was taken aback. He had always dreamed of visiting the great shipyards of Lantria, far away to the south, and had trouble conceiving of a more interesting destination.
‘I spoke to you of an inheritance,’ answered his friend. ‘What we have here is the legacy of science, Tymon. We’re standing on the brink of a new age. I meant what I said: this air-chariot will set us free. All of us. Argosians, Nurians, everyone…It doesn’t necessarily need ether, though we’ll add emergency sacks to the test model, just in case. With a few modifications it could run on vegetable or animal waste. Everyone will be able to use it. It’ll mean a better world, mark my words…’
One of the complaints brought against Galliano by the Priests’ Council regarded his idealism. He subscribed to the flimsiest doctrines of social equality, none of which had ever been shown to work. Tymon did not attempt to follow the old man’s reasoning. All he knew was that the mention of Nurians depressed him. He felt a twist of disappointment. The machine was not to be his personal inheritance after all, but another one of the inventor’s grandiose and so far unsuccessful bids to save humanity. The boy could not have cared less for a ‘legacy of science’. Galliano, however, was bubbling over with his new schemes.
Tymon's Flight Page 3