Tymon's Flight

by Mary Victoria

  Conniving snickers accompanied the remark. A shiver passed down Tymon’s spine. Had news of his brush with the pilgrims reached ears at the seminary, or were the bullies at the next table simply teasing him, unaware that their remarks bore any relation to the truth? He recognised the leering youths from the study session. Their ringleader was a fat-cheeked and arrogant third-year named Fletch, the boorish son of a plantation owner, fat-cheeked and arrogant. Response was futile, and would only cost him further in taunts.

  ‘What are they talking about?’ he whispered to Piri, exasperated. ‘What bets?’

  But it was Bolas who answered, replenishing his plate from the communal pot at the centre of the table.

  ‘Some people think it’s intelligent to make wagers on which pilgrim will volunteer for the Sacrifice,’ he observed scathingly. ‘One of Fletch’s bright ideas. Ignore him, Tymon.’

  The boy frowned. This was new. He had not seen seminary students playing such games before. The idea perturbed him; it attracted and repelled him at the same time.

  ‘What a perfect situation.’ Wick rolled his eyes in disgust. ‘One louse volunteers for the Sacrifice. The rest go to a vine plantation. Fletch makes a killing, either way…’

  ‘If they really volunteer at all,’ piped up Piri. ‘The bets could be rigged. I’ve heard—’

  ‘What you hear is nonsense and what you say is worse, Piri.’ Bolas cut him off impatiently.

  ‘What have you heard?’ asked Tymon. Morbid fascination with the subject was getting the better of him. ‘Let him talk, Bolas.’

  Piri flushed with excitement at being the centre of attention. ‘I’ve heard,’ he said, lowering his voice, ‘that the priests help the ceremony along a bit. They choose a likely man beforehand. On the day of the Festival they get him drunk—’

  ‘That’s not true!’ cried Wick. ‘Shame on you, Piri, that’s a dirty lie.’

  ‘It’s what people say,’ protested the younger boy.

  ‘Well, it’s wrong. My uncle is one of the torchbearers for the Rites. He’d never take part in a murder,’ said Bolas. He scowled disapprovingly at Piri. ‘You shouldn’t repeat vicious jokes.’

  The chinless student crumpled with embarrassment. Tymon rallied to his defence.

  ‘If we’re talking about bad jokes, then the wagers are worse,’ he pointed out. ‘I’m surprised the Fathers allow it—’

  He was interrupted by the jarring sound of Wick’s laughter.

  ‘I’m surprised you, for one, worry about what the Fathers allow,’ his friend grinned knowingly. ‘Relax, Ty. You’re not the only one to disapprove of people like Fletch. We’re not placing the bets, remember.’

  Tymon would have liked to make a clever rejoinder, to dismiss the subject with a witticism, but his tongue felt heavy and useless and he could not find the right words. The memory of the red-haired pilgrim standing straight and proud in the marketplace rose unbidden in his mind. He found himself vaguely hoping that the unusual youth would not be the one volunteering, or being volunteered, for the Sacrifice. Although he did not really believe Piri’s insinuations, he was not fool enough to suppose that dignity would be an acceptable quality in a slave. The mention of the tithe-pilgrims depressed him and he no longer participated in the conversation. After the meal he helped the others clear away the bowls and trestle tables, but when the work was done he let his friends return to the dormitories without him. He dawdled alone in the empty courtyard, watching the stars appear one by one between the great, stirring shadows of the leaf-forests overhead.

  A great yearning took hold of him to leave the city, to be free of the priests, their Rites and his indenture in one stroke. It was unfair, he thought. If only Galliano’s machine were not consigned to the Void, along with its mad inventor! If only the old man had dreamed of riches instead of science. They might have quit Argos when the air-chariot was built and sought out some haven of liberty together. He had heard that a man might find gainful work in Lantria, whatever his origins. He decided that he must convince Galliano to give up, or at least delay, the suicidal mission into the Storm. It seemed to him that night that unless the machine was saved, his life was a lost cause.

  4

  Tymon watched his fellows carefully in the weeks leading up to the Spring Festival. He noticed that unlike the other students in his class, he was not included in the process of Guild applications the took place in preparation for the Fair. Every boy his age was called to at least one meeting with prospective employers over the course of that month, except for him. The yearning that had filled his heart after his public humiliation by Rede hardened to cynicism, for he no longer believed that his guardians would allow him to be apprenticed to a reputable trade. He was just a bound-boy, incapable of more than physical labour, and certainly no candidate for an organisation such as the Navigators’ Guild. He did not forget his dreams but began to consider other means of fulfilling them. He kept his head low and took care not to miss a single class. He carried out his Rites-duties without fail, baulking at no task, however menial. A plan to counter the priests had begun to form in his mind; it necessitated both time and discretion to come to fruition.

  As the holiday approached, an atmosphere of giddy excitement took over the city. Inns were filled to bursting point and the odour of cooking invaded the streets and courtyards, for there would be celebrations after the Rites, a feast of indulgence after weeks of abstinence. The seminary was no exception. The preparations in the kitchens were enough to set the novices salivating days in advance: sweetbean pasties and bird pies by the dozen were left to cool on the windowsills, while a pile of rosy frogapples and three vats of Treesap wine lay in a corner of the compound garden, awaiting the revelry. They would be served up during the banquet that followed the Rites, in the private College pavilion by the air-harbour. The whole town would turn out on the quays that day to witness the famous ritual. The docks rang with the sound of hammers as stalls and stands were constructed to accommodate the crush.

  The commotion provided a perfect cover for Tymon, who took advantage of the hustle and bustle at the seminary to disappear on errands of his own. He acquired a habit of rising before the dawn bells to slip out of the dormitory while it was still dark. His destination at that hour was, first and predictably, the kitchens, in quest of an early breakfast from Masha. His subsequent goal was more unusual, however. Every morning in the weeks prior to the Festival, he was to be seen mounting the steps to the College Library, entering the only section of it available to novices—the Prayer Room. It was baffling to his friends and frankly disturbing to the old cook, who marked the new tendency with alarm.

  Masha was one of the few who cared to know about Tymon’s comings and goings, regardless of whether he attended class or fulfilled his Rites-duties. Her instincts told her that something was up. It was not simply that the boy was glum and withdrawn. She put that down to his age and the sap of adolescence invading his body. It concerned her that he appeared to have caught religion. She had warned him to behave but had not expected her advice to be taken to such pedantic lengths. His visits to the Prayer Room were too good to be true. She noticed that he was making a point of avoiding Nell; purity laws notwithstanding, this sudden reversal of his natural leanings did not bode well, in her opinion. It was bad enough that he was indentured to the priests. He should not waste time trying to be one.

  The day before the Festival, she was finally able to corner her charge and question him about his activities. Tymon had stopped by the kitchens that morning in order to beg for food and favours, as was his habit, and she took advantage of the opportunity to make him try on his green robes, which she had shortened to match his wiry frame.

  ‘With the amount you eat you should be fatter than this,’ she muttered, her mouth full of hardwood pins.

  She added one carefully to Tymon’s hem as he stood before her and squinted at the folds of the robe in the lamplight. Dawn was only just brightening the sky above the compound and the kitchen was quiet, not y
et the centre of clatter and industry it would be in an hour or so.

  ‘Two double-sized breakfasts a day for the past month,’ she noted with asperity. ‘And you’re still as skinny as a piece of vine.’ She straightened up from her work. ‘Well, that’s done. Now explain to me. What was it you were after again?’ Her boy had come to her with a particularly strange request that morning.

  ‘Ether oil, Amu. I know there’s a store of it in the College cellars,’ he pleaded. ‘You can get it for me. Go on.’

  Masha peered sharply at him. Tymon’s eyes had the dusty, inward-turned look she knew too well, a mask for disobedience. He was up to no good, she decided. Ether oil was an expensive commodity, a distilled form of the volatile gas used to float dirigibles. It also produced hallucinations when taken with food. She snapped shut the sewing box with an impatient gesture.

  ‘Planning a prank, I suppose?’ she sighed.

  ‘Yes, Amu,’ he lied.

  After weeks of stringent Purity laws, disorder and exuberance at the Festival were expected, a necessary finale. An old seminary tradition tolerated practical jokes after the Rites, an exercise simply referred to as ‘the prank’. Any professor particularly reviled by the boys became the focus of a plot to ridicule him at the College banquet. Masha thought she knew now what Tymon had been planning all this time, in the library.

  ‘Is it Rede this year?’ she asked with a smile of relief. This was just what her boy should be preoccupied with at the moment, not books or religion. It was a reassuring return to form.

  ‘Yes.’ He tried to keep his voice neutral. She was wrong, of course. He wanted the ether oil for other purposes. But the prank was an expedient explanation.

  ‘Well. Lord White-Neck has it coming to him,’ she observed. ‘Mind no one gets hurt and I’ll find you a bottle. You can pick it up before Bread-Giving today.’

  ‘Thank you, Amu. I really appreciate it.’

  She narrowed her eyes at him, a workroughened fist planted on her hip. ‘You won’t miss Bread-Giving, I hope.’

  A breath of irritation escaped his lips. ‘I’ll be there. I’ve done all my duties up till now, Amu, haven’t you noticed? I’m being good, like I said.’

  ‘Green Mother, who bore us all,’ snorted Masha. ‘The day that’s true will be a day of miracles. Now—off with those robes, before you dirty them. I’ll have them ready for you tomorrow morning.’

  A few minutes later Tymon hurried out of the kitchen compound, a bundle of Festival cakes in his hand and a gleam of triumph in his eye. The acquisition of the ether oil was a crowning achievement. He had no intention of wasting his prize on the students’ prank, which he disdained in any case as an activity fit for mere children. Masha’s suspicions were well founded: Tymon was indeed up to no good. His delinquency was of a more drastic variety than she supposed. He was still smarting from Rede’s treatment and nothing would have pleased him better than to see his hated professor ridiculed at the Festival banquet. But he was planning more than a prank, a schoolboy’s revenge. He was not about to be barred from the Rites on a trumped-up charge, or beyond that, make do with the seminary’s leavings. He wanted to be quit of the priests and their crippling indenture forever. He had decided to forestall the inevitable by running away.

  As a novice, he had few personal belongings and no private space of his own. He overcame this problem by using the Prayer Room to organise his escape. The students’ section was less an annex than a glorified stockroom for the library. Mildewed liturgies and moth-eaten psalms lay packed against the walls; there was barely space to manoeuvre between the towering columns of books on the floor. A stack of manuscripts near the back of the room served as a cache for Tymon. Quietly and steadily, he had been adding every extra breakfast to an accumulated hoard. Just as regularly, taking the utmost care not to infringe on seminary rules, he had continued to carry out his charity duty, visiting Galliano as often as his other responsibilities allowed. Some of the smuggled food went with him to the old man’s workshop to fuel the construction of the scientist’s flying machine. But much of the stash remained hidden in the Prayer Room, between the Nineteen Rain Chants and the Nonian Liturgies, in anticipation of a final getaway. The opportune moment for departure, the boy believed, was at hand. His hopes revolved around the air-chariot, and the air-chariot was ready.

  He strode purposefully towards the Library, a three-storey building on the east side of the College. The heavy doors swung wide at his touch and he plunged on without pause into the panelled corridor beyond. Tomorrow, he told himself, it would all come together. His patience would pay off. He had reason to feel elated: after weeks of construction, Galliano’s machine sat in hulking black glory on the incline outside the workshop. It had been tested and found air-worthy. Twice they had watched the ungainly contraption rise ponderously into the sky, only to nose-dive back to the knot after a few seconds. Twice they had rebuilt the wooden body, throwing out excess weight. In the end the air-chariot had turned into a sleek, insect-like creation. It had a large hardwood propeller on its topside, trestle-legs and a steering propeller on its tail. The boiler was about the size of a wine barrel and devoured quantities of dehydrated sap, a thick, foul-smelling substance called Tree-gall. The craft was equipped with a single emergency ether sack. The day before, the old man and the boy had watched their creation lurch into the air without a hitch, tethered to a line. They had allowed it to hover noisily above the vine terraces for two minutes, defying gravity, before they killed the motor and watched it drift slowly back down to the knot unharmed. Tymon still had the taste of victory in his mouth. He had come to care as much about the success of the machine as Galliano, though for different reasons.

  The scientist had promised him that they would conduct the first manned flight the day after the Festival. It was this expedition Tymon counted on to realise his escape. He imagined that he might persuade Galliano to drop him off in Lantria. In his enthusiasm he had not considered the fact that the South Fringes were at least three days’ journey away, even in a flying machine. His notion of distances was that of a person who had never travelled more than a few hours from his doorstep. He lived in his dreams, and his dreams soared to far horizons that morning.

  His step was jaunty as he pushed open the Prayer Room door. The musty tang of ancient leaves and slowly rotting parchments stung his nostrils; he blinked, blinded a moment by the gloom. The window shutters were still closed. He made his way fumblingly to the rear of the room and reached into the space behind one of the dusty stacks, retrieving a grass-weave bag. It smelled faintly of Festival cakes. He had just finished emptying his latest spoils into its depths, when an unexpected sound caused him to drop his booty and scramble to his feet in apprehension. A snort of quiet laughter echoed through the stacks as Wick’s familiar form detached itself from the shadows.

  ‘Well, well,’ remarked the other boy, laconic. ‘I didn’t think you came here every morning just to pray. I was right, as usual.’

  For an instant, Tymon felt cold. It was too dark in the room to make out much of his classmate’s expression. Wick’s face was a formless smudge.

  ‘Have you been following me?’ he blurted out, more anxiously than he intended.

  ‘Following? Green grace, Ty, you’re not that interesting,’ laughed Wick. His teeth flashed in the dim light. ‘I have a real job to do here. I’m library prefect, don’t you remember? You know. Because of the Guild.’

  Wick had announced to his friends a fortnight ago that he was to be considered for a bookmaker’s apprentice. A place at the prestigious Scribes’ Guild had been obtained for him on special introduction by his father, before he had even attended the Fair. He had spent much of his time lately closeted in meetings with his prospective employers. Tymon envied the ease with which his friend’s future was being arranged, irrespective of age and the fact that he had not even entered his Green Year. He watched morosely as Wick squatted on his haunches beside the grass-weave bag, flipping it open with an appreciative whistle.<
br />
  ‘Are these Festival cakes you’re hoarding?’ he exclaimed. ‘You lucky beggar—no one gives me a second breakfast. You know you’re not supposed to bring food to the library. You owe me.’

  ‘Just take what you want and be quiet about it,’ muttered Tymon.

  Wick popped two of the little cakes into his mouth. ‘That’s quite a haul,’ he commented shrewdly. ‘Seems too much for one person.’

  ‘You should be in a lawyers’ guild, not doing a leaf-binding apprenticeship,’ groaned Tymon in exasperation. ‘It’s a shame to waste such fabulous mental powers on parchment and glue.’

  ‘So?’ pressed the other, still grinning with impish insistence. ‘You’re not going to get out of this, you know. Who are the cakes for?’ He waited pointedly for an explanation.

  Tymon struggled with himself. He was tempted to confide completely in his friend, to tell him of his plan to run away from the seminary. He wanted to prove that he too had a promising, if unconventional future. It was with difficulty that he kept silent regarding the hopes he had nurtured over the past few weeks.

  ‘You’ve caught me, oh brilliant one,’ he conceded. ‘The extra food is for Galliano. Satisfied?’

  ‘I just enjoy being right,’ returned Wick. ‘I thought it might have something to do with the old man.’ He glanced sidelong at Tymon. ‘Is he still building that pointless heresy of his? The dirigible that goes without the wind?’

  ‘It works.’ The boy felt impelled to boast of his success, to defend his unorthodox pastime. ‘We’ve made it fly.’

  He was rewarded by the look of complete astonishment on Wick’s face. ‘So,’ mused his classmate. ‘Is he actually going to use it?’

  ‘That’s the idea.’

  ‘Is the old fool still set on crossing the Storm?’

  Tymon frowned uncomfortably. During the course of the machine’s construction Galliano had often spoken of his aim of exploration. He had given up trying to dissuade the old man and set his sights upon his own goals. Wick’s question upset his complacence—not only because it brought up the vexed subject of the Storm, but because it reminded him that despite all his preparations, he had as yet failed to discuss his getaway properly with Galliano. He feared that the scientist would see his request to go to Lantria as a form of treason, the abandonment of what, in his mind, was their shared objective. Time was running out before the test flight and still the matter remained unresolved. He planned to slip away the following evening during the College banquet and meet Galliano at the workshop. He told himself that he would speak with the old man then.