‘Imagine if everyone could travel and trade without restriction,’ he continued excitedly. ‘No need to sell one’s life and labour for a few barrels of water. Better yet, imagine using the machine to find an inexhaustible source of water for everyone, once and for all! And where would we find that, you ask?’
He paused, his finger raised to the sky, waiting for a response. Tymon shook his head, silently protesting ignorance.
‘Well, alright then,’ resumed the scientist, deflated. ‘If I asked you what the universe looked like as a whole, what would you say?’
The boy sensed that his friend’s eccentric theories were about to make another appearance. Smiling, he gave the textbook answer on cosmology.
‘The Tree roots go down into the Maelstrom of Hell below the Storm. The branches reach up to Heaven. We are in between.’
‘Thankfully. But what about Hell? What really goes on under the Storm? We see the dome of the sky and the stars rising over the leaf-line. What do you imagine there is, down there, below us?’
The priests at the seminary had given graphic accounts of the Maelstrom to the younger novices. Tymon found the tales awkward to repeat.
‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘The Fathers say there’s a blasting inferno and eternal wind among the roots of the Tree, where demons ride about on the spirits of the dead, tormenting them with…ah…brooms…’
‘Brooms! What nonsense!’ noted Galliano crisply. ‘And an inferno? When all it does is rain under those clouds? Does that sound in any way probable to you?’
‘No,’ said Tymon with some relief. ‘No, it doesn’t.’
There was a pause. Tymon wondered what all this pointless conjecture could be leading up to. What did it matter if fire or water was at the bottom of the world, so long as the world existed? But Galliano’s eyes were shining. He had left ordinary common sense behind, and would have been happy to debate existence itself if it furthered his ideas.
‘Rain!’ he whispered, exultant. ‘All it does is rain down there, boy. And all we have to do is find a way to collect that rain. Gallons of free water.’
‘Yes, in theory, but it’s impossible—’
‘Obviously!’ crowed the inventor, deaf to anything but the first half of his reply. ‘We now have the opportunity of a lifetime to benefit humanity! Finally, the science of exploration has caught up with our dreams. If we don’t use the machine for the greater good, what kind of explorers are we?’
The boy glanced up in alarm. In the course of Galliano’s rhetoric, he had put two and two together.
‘No one can enter the Storm,’ he cried. ‘It’s too dangerous!’
‘If the machine is built solidly, I’m reasonably confident of my chances. I wouldn’t use ether, as the sacks would be ripped apart by the wind. That’s why the propellers come in handy. They would weather the Storm—use the wind, instead of being at its mercy.’
Tymon stirred uneasily. This was further down the road to heresy than he had ever known his old friend to go, and insanity to boot. To send a vehicle on a fool’s errand into the Storm would invite censure in this life and damnation in the next. It was sacrilege to tempt the wind in such a manner.
‘It’s impossible,’ he repeated. ‘You can’t do it, Apu.’
‘Why not?’ The scientist stared at him quizzically.
‘Because it’s unnatural!’
Galliano burst out laughing at this. ‘All things in their proper place, eh? Humans above, the children of the Tree, and demons below in the infernal Void! I didn’t think you’d be one to trot out that drivel, Tymon. Really, you should know better. Does it strike you as feasible that we were meant to live in the Tree, that we’d always been here and that we’d be here forever? Wouldn’t we have wings to fly like the birds in that case, or claws to grip the bark, or be able to wind about branches like snakes? What nonsense!’
‘I don’t think that,’ Tymon stammered, hotfaced and flustered. ‘The point is, no one survives the Storm. If we tried to go there, we’d never come back.’
‘I’m going alone,’ emphasised Galliano. ‘There is no “we” about it.’
The boy gave up the argument in despair. Surely his mentor had read descriptions of the doomed Storm Ventures, logged on countless leaves in the College library? As a novice Tymon had never been granted access to the library stacks, but Galliano would have studied the texts for many years. Did he not remember the crimes of the mad Explorer Sect which sent innocent navigators to their deaths by the hundreds, all for the sake of so-called progress? They, too, had wanted to see what lay below the clouds, to map the shape of Hell. Their science had proven in the end to be demon-worship. Progress was given a bad name. Dimly, Tymon began to guess at the sort of charges that had cost Galliano his priesthood.
‘There is one more thing,’ said the old man, after getting nothing but stubborn silence from his auditor. ‘You’re right—the Storm is formidable. Normally I would not risk even my own life in it. But I have reason to believe that the Maelstrom is growing weaker. It should be possible to go in, collect the rainwater, and come out.’
Tymon shook his head again. The conversation had taken a turn for the ludicrous. A vision of demons beating the hull of the machine with broom-handles came to him. Why waste this wonderful invention on a mad heresy, debunked over a century ago?
‘Every year,’ continued Galliano, softly, ‘I measure the wind speed and precipitation during the winter season. I have been doing this for almost fifty years. It was one of the first experiments I began when I was a student at the seminary, like you.’
‘They threw you out of the College for doing experiments, Apu. Maybe they were right. You’re going to your death if you enter the Storm.’
‘For fifty years, I compared measurements,’ persisted his companion, ignoring him. ‘The results are inescapable. The rains in the Central Canopy are abating. The rain-wells are never more than half full nowadays, and the drought in the Eastern Canopy only gets worse. We’ll probably be next.’ He struck the top of the wall with the flat of his palm. ‘I’m sure it worries the Council. Why else would they insist on the Sacrifice every year? Why else convince those poor fools to throw themselves into a rift? Staving off the anger of the Tree—a paltry superstition! But it distracts from the real problem.’
Tymon stared sullenly at the skeleton of the machine lying on the dusty flags of the courtyard. The invention might have been a means to a better world for the scientist, but for the boy, a dirigible was an end in itself. Why anyone would want to throw one away on a voyage to the Storm was beyond him. He did not seek to change his world, only to escape from it. He had no patience with the pilgrims, or with their Sacrifice; he told himself that if he had to watch a man die, it was only because he was given no other choice. Glumly, he wished that they would all, priests and pilgrims both, jump into the Mouth and disappear forever.
‘If they want to do it, let them,’ he shrugged. ‘Maybe they really believe it’ll cure the drought.’
‘And what do you believe?’ asked Galliano.
Tymon was as tongue-tied in the face of this question as he had been earlier that morning, confronted by the beggar. With the memory of the episode by the gates came a realisation of the time he had spent away from the seminary. His reprieve had long since run out. Bolas would be able to do nothing more for him. As if on cue, the faraway bells took up the call to afternoon prayer. Tymon jumped up from the wall in a panic. He had already shirked one temple ritual that day; two would be inexcusable.
‘I have to go, Apu,’ he cried. ‘I can’t miss afternoon prayers. Even Father Mossing would object.’
The old man glanced at him sharply. ‘I wouldn’t mention what you’ve been doing here today to any of your tutors,’ he cautioned. ‘They may not understand.’
‘What do you take me for?’ Tymon protested. ‘A snivelling first-year?’
He jogged off down the path from the workshop. ‘Don’t fly away without me, Apu!’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be
back tomorrow, after lunch.’
He did not wait for an answer for he knew well enough that the old man would go nowhere without him. By Galliano’s own very optimistic calculations, there remained at least three weeks’ work before the machine would be air-worthy.
The scientist smiled as he gazed after his young friend. ‘No chance of that,’ he murmured. ‘Without hope, what use is there in flying?’
He rose from his seat with a sigh, and shuffled back to the half-formed carcass of the machine.
3
The main stairs to the temple stretched in an unbroken line from the city streets to the Hall at the summit of its buttress. The bells had finished tolling by the time the boy reached the top of the steep incline, puffing and sweating from his run. He took off his sandals and thrust them behind a pillar, the last in a long line of abandoned footwear trailing along the portico. Like all Argosian shrines, the temple Hall had eight sides. Its doors faced east. The fluted columns and arcades that adorned its exterior were cunningly anchored to the supporting branch, and appeared to rise seamlessly out of the bark, as if the Tree had simply grown them to order. A bird could fly from the summit of the dome across five hundred feet of open air to alight on the ledge outside the Divine Mouth. From where Tymon stood the Tree-rift was just visible. This time the boy’s eyes flicked towards it. He raised his hand to his forehead in an automatic gesture of piety—then stopped, and dropped his arm with an angry shrug. The rituals of devotion he had grown up with seemed suddenly childish and unnecessary. He hurried through the open doors of the temple, into the fragrant shadows beyond.
Inside the Hall, the atmosphere was dim and hazy. The only natural light came from eight high arched windows, one in each facet of the dome. The dusty rays filtered down into the central nave through layers of smoke and incense. Dozens of small beeswax candles blurred the heavy air with a haze of flames and sap-burners sent thick curls of vapour up to icons of the saints. Priests were ranged in tiered seating along six of the eight walls: the rows of students sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor below. One of the Fathers stood at a raised lectern on the northern end of the Hall, leading the gathering in prayer. Tymon joined the row of youthful worshippers nearest the doors. His contemporaries might have been there all morning, he thought to himself wryly; he had left them as they were going up to the temple and found them still firmly ensconced when he returned. They were chanting the First Liturgy of the Tree. He added his voice belatedly to the chorus.
…And from Her flowed the Sap of life
That causes all to be.
Father Mossing, the priest at the lecturn, was a comic favourite among the novices. When Tymon’s eyes had become accustomed to the low light, he was able to make out his tutor’s round face beaming over the gathering. Mossing rarely scolded a latecomer to prayers. He continued the service after Tymon’s tardy entrance without missing a beat, leaning his plump arms on the lectern.
‘The Tree is the Beginning.’
‘The Tree is the Beginning,’ his audience dutifully repeated.
‘The Tree is the End.’
‘The Tree is the End,’ muttered the congregation.
‘The Tree is Life.’
‘The Tree is Life.’ The boys’ voices straggled out of time with each other.
‘She lifted us up from darkness into the light, from death to life. She bore us up in Her arms that we might behold Her beauty. In the beauty we walk.’
‘In the beauty.’
‘Today’s lesson is Saint Usala the Green, chapter nine, verses three to twelve.’
There was a rustle of cracked leaves as the congregation turned to the appropriate place in their psalm books. Mossing read out the passage in singsong tones.
‘And the divines accused Saint Usala of perverting the youth of the city, saying:
“You teach the young ones sorcery. You bring together Focal groups and claim to see the future. This is blasphemy. Prophecy came to an end with Saint Loa. The Sap is silent and shall be so until the End Days.”
“On the contrary, the Sap speaks all the time, if you would only listen,” replied Saint Usala. “But I do not teach sorcery. A sorcerer meddles with forces he does not understand. A Grafter knows those forces are meddling with him.”
The sweat dried on Tymon’s neck. The echoes of the Hall threw back the words of the reading in sudden gusts and unrecognisable fragments, as if the building itself were speaking, denying the official version, telling a different story. The past seemed still to breathe in the place. The Hall doubled as an ecclesiastical court and many of the saints and martyrs of Argosian history, as well as its most notorious heretics, had at one time passed through these doors. Saint Loa himself had stood there as he cursed and cast out the Seven Hypocrites of Mung; there, the twin seers, Pesh and Amran, had prophesised the fall of the Nurian Empire. The infamous Sorceress of Nur had ended her career in this very spot. Even the Saint Usala of the reading had been brought to trial in the Hall, arraigned by the Council on charges of heresy and sorcery. She was only canonised a century after her death when many of her predictions were found, embarrassingly, to have come true.
The priests in Argos were wary of those claiming to see the future. Only one official canon of prophecy was admitted by the seminary. Only that art of Grafting, the sacred Sight accorded by the Tree to Her chosen emissaries, was still considered a mark of sainthood. Grafters were said to be able to speak with the Sap: no mere fluid running in the heartwood, but the mystic life-force of the Tree. The prophets of old did not only predict the future. They cultivated it, trained and pruned it, until it conformed to a certain ideal and was ‘as it should be’. They had powers equal to their task. They could speak with the dead, bend a man’s will to their own, or conjure up false visions to confuse their enemies. These powers of illusion, or Seemings, became reality if those watching believed strongly enough in them. But none were left with the faith to merit a Grafter’s power. The priests taught that direct communication with the Tree was now impossible. Only annotation, discussion and endless commentary on what had already been Seen was acceptable. The line of prophecy had come to an end and the authorised canon was complete. The art of Grafting belonged to legend.
Tymon, for his part, was uninterested in legends. He paid little heed to the temple reading and less to his history lessons. Across the Hall he distinguished the figure of his friend Wick, stretching backwards out of a row in an attempt to capture his attention. His classmate clutched his throat and made a gagging face, the attitude of a hanged man, then pointed merrily in his direction. Tymon shrugged back in a show of indifference. He could guess what Wick had to say: he had probably been missed at Treeology class that morning, and was in trouble with one of the tutors. A habitual truant, he hardly considered skipping class a crime worth mentioning. He pretended not to notice the other boy’s continuing contortions and allowed his gaze to wander over the Hall, as it had a thousand times before. Mossing droned on.
‘And Saint Usala asked the divines, “Do you believe in the End Times?”
“Naturally,” they said. “The righteous shall be divided from the wicked. The Mouth shall speak. It has been prophesised.”
“As simple as all that?” said the saint, and she laughed.
Her reply displeased them. “And what do you believe?” they retorted.
The repetition of Galliano’s question jarred in Tymon’s ears. He frowned at the temple ceiling. Colourful scenes from the life of Saint Loa, founding Father of Argos, adorned the eight archways holding up the dome. They showed the prophet performing the deeds for which he was celebrated. Despite having seen those same pictures since his childhood, he noticed for the first time, with distaste, that one of the carvings portrayed a group of eastern pilgrims visiting Argos. Though no Nurian, free or tithe, had arrived in the city until centuries after the saint’s death, the image appeared to anticipate the glory and power of the Argosian Empire. The foreigners were immediately recognisable, dressed in matching caps and
gowns with their pale painted faces angled up at the temple in attitudes of adoration.
Father Mossing’s book snapped shut, jolting Tymon from his thoughts.
‘Sacrifice is the deepest mystery,’ the priest warbled happily, as if he were announcing a wedding. ‘The death of one brings life to the many. Physical death brings spiritual life. We must all bear in mind Saint Usala’s story in the coming days, for she walked the Path of Sacrifice like many of the saints. She gave herself up to the Tree, became Eaten, that we might receive God’s green grace. Those who walk the Path die so that we might truly live. They fall to darkness that we might see the light…’
Wick was now leaning out of the row at a dangerous angle, his grimaces extreme. Tymon remembered with a sudden stab of anxiety that he did not yet know if he had been spotted with the tramp that morning. Wick’s paroxysms might signify more trouble than he had at first thought. Mossing’s sermon ground on unheard as he considered this new and unpleasant possibility. The Dean had already departed on his retreat, but he might well have communicated Tymon’s transgression to someone else and left instructions regarding his punishment. He threw his classmate a look of wide-eyed innocence. Wick indicated a cut throat with his hand, a stage beyond hanging. You’re dead, he signalled.
Tymon was obliged to wait, squirming with frustration, until the service was over to obtain any further information. At last Father Mossing ground to a halt and the novices belted out the closing hymn in a babble of impatience, pouring out of the doors before the echoes had faded from the Hall. Tymon made out Wick’s grinning face in the crowd on the outside portico and pushed his way towards him. When he arrived at his side the other boy clapped a hand on his shoulder with a show of mock severity.
‘You’d better have a good excuse, young man!’ he pronounced, in a plausible imitation of one of the seminary Fathers. He spun Tymon about on his heel and marched him along the portico. ‘You missed morning prayers and garden duty, and Rede was furious you skipped Treeology! Out with it—which demon of the flesh tempted you to sin?’
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