‘Well, so that’s it, then,’ the old man murmured. ‘You must despise me.’ He rose from his seat. ‘After all my high-minded talk about the pilgrims…I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing you again.’
‘What?’ Tymon shook off his reverie, to find the scientist already tottering away down the track to the workshop. He jumped up after him. ‘Of course I don’t despise you! You only told the truth. It’s not your fault—’
‘I’ve tried to convince myself of that. It doesn’t work. I am to blame. I should have known they would react with some damn fool piece of superstition.’
‘Apu—’ The boy quickened his pace on the dusty track. Galliano was surprisingly difficult to keep up with. ‘Listen to me. It’s not your fault. But you have to use the air-chariot. You will, once you hear this—’
‘No, no, no.’ The old scientist batted away Tymon’s attempts to grab his sleeve and arrest his headlong progress. ‘I’ve made up my mind. No more running away. I’ll go down there again, tomorrow. I’ll go down and pester them until they agree to see me. They can throw me in a jail cell—’
‘Apu, you have to listen. I met someone today—’
‘—till the whole world rots away,’ continued Galliano extravagantly, deaf to his protestations. ‘Someone has to stand up for what’s right—’
‘If you would just listen a minute,’ panted Tymon. ‘There’s something more important you need to do. One of the pil—’
‘That Storm business is all very well, but it can wait, boy!’ declared his friend. He stabbed his finger excitedly in the air as he jogged down the track. ‘We were being selfish. I told the Council once and I’ll tell them again. The Sacrifice will not save us. The Tree is rotten to the core. Why, what is the Mouth but a symptom—’
He came to a skidding halt and turned to Tymon with an anxious expression. ‘You didn’t do it, did you? You didn’t go to the Mouth?’
‘They barred me,’ growled Tymon, out of breath and exasperated at the old man’s interruptions. ‘For talking to a pilgrim. That’s what I’ve been trying to say all this time, Apu. You won’t want to bother with the Council when you hear my plan. We can help her escape—if she decides to join us, I mean—it’s a girl, by the way, and no one knows—oh, it’s a long story.’
‘We won’t fly too near the town, of course. No sense in drawing an audience at this point in the proceedings.’ Galliano peered out from beneath the air-chariot, wielding a pair of oversized bellows, and cast a disparaging glance at Tymon’s meagre bundle of provisions. ‘You thought a basket-lantern and a dozen Festival cakes would get you all the way to Lantria? If you’d tried that, I’d have been dead of worry!’
Tymon only grinned in answer and slung his little bag into the air-chariot’s cockpit. The machine cut a striking silhouette against the bright evening clouds. A spark of flame leapt in its belly and the pistons pumped and belched as the propellers beat with increasing fury. They had decided to do a short test flight that night after all, in order to be sure the air-chariot would be able to embark on a longer journey. As Galliano had noted dryly, it would be a shame to whisk their extraordinary fugitive from under the noses of the priests only to crash back down to the canopy a few seconds later.
The old man had listened to Tymon’s description of the red-haired girl and her accusations against the Council with great interest, and taken to the idea of rescue as readily as the boy had hoped. He had promised Tymon that should the test be successful, they would leave the city together the very next morning—in the company of the unusual pilgrim if she turned up, and without her if she did not. He had even suggested, much to Tymon’s amazement, that should she default on their arrangement, they might discreetly follow the tithe-transport and attempt to help her again at a later date. But he had also warned him that they would be fools to think the Council would turn a blind eye to their actions, particularly if they were suspected of helping a pilgrim.
‘I was never privy to their lofty secrets,’ he had admitted ruefully. ‘A professor of Applied Treeology is useful only when you need his experiments to support your policy. My experiments do not support murder. But if what your friend says is true—and I have little doubt it is—then Fallow will do anything to keep the facts hidden. We won’t be welcome in Argos city again. Alone, I don’t care to go to the trouble of starting a new life. But together: that’s something different.’
Now, as the air-chariot tugged at its moorings like an eager messenger bird, the scientist clambered out from under the machine, wiping his hands on a dirty cloth. He gestured proudly up at the belching, shuddering contraption.
‘How do you like your inheritance, boy?’
‘Inheritance?’ Tymon repeated, dumbly over the thud of the propellers.
‘This little beauty is going to be yours, I hope you realise,’ noted Galliano. He sprang nimbly over the side of the machine and into the cockpit. ‘We’ll go to Lantria first, I think. Set you up with your runaway bride maybe.’
His inheritance. The boy felt ready to burst with excitement. This mad invention, this wonderful, absurd engine would be his after all. He was no longer trapped by the seminary. He had broken free of the cage.
‘What about the Tree dying, and exploring the Storm?’ he called back.
‘We can always build another one for that,’ Galliano yelled over his shoulder. ‘Lantrians might help, actually. Nation of ship-builders. Cast off the ropes, boy, it’s time to go!’
Tymon shook the tethers free, vaulting into the open cockpit after the old man. He could not stop smiling. The future was waiting for him, beckoning, just around the corner. He was obliged to clutch the sides of the air-chariot as it lurched into the air, spluttering and coughing. The vinefields receded at a dizzying speed and the machine pitched precariously from side to side as it flew, trailing a magnificent cloud of smoke. It seemed to romp rather than glide through the sky.
‘By the bells, have you ever seen such a sight?’ crowed Galliano, wrestling with the steering rods. ‘We’re going to sweep your pilgrim sweetheart off her feet!’
‘If she comes at all,’ Tymon shouted merrily through the headwind. ‘She doesn’t need us, remember?’
‘Well, we need us. We non-men should stick together,’ observed the scientist.
Tymon fell silent in the cacophony of the propellers, blinking at the vista below him in a happy daze. Galliano steered them northwest, flying low over the vine-frames. They came perilously close to taking the roof off a farmer’s bird-pen and provoked a panic among the margeese. Seconds later the terraced slope of the branch fell away to nothingness and they hurtled out over the west chasm, leaving the environs of Argos city behind. The air-chariot pitched and swayed. Tymon was assailed with a brief succession of contradictory viewpoints. Before him swung the dizzy green depths of the chasm, then the massed leaf-forests, tinged with the glow of the setting sun. There was a swirl of sky and green, and the machine righted itself. It dipped towards the gulf one last time then rose steadily against the western horizon. They climbed upwards for a long time, a dot on the shining clouds, till Galliano pulled hard on the right-hand steering rod. The machine pitched to the south and drew a smoky arc against the sky, turning sharply back towards Argos city. The course change was so abrupt that Tymon let go of the sides of the cockpit and narrowly missed being tipped out.
‘We’re going to have to get straps for this thing,’ he yelled through the wind to Galliano.
‘Maps? Who needs maps?’ the scientist bellowed, deafly. ‘We can steer by the stars, boy!’
The sight that greeted them as they sped over the canopy was breathtaking. The branches and leaf-forests were laid out beneath them like a colossal heaped-up carpet. The complex design formed by the Tree’s huge limbs was clearly visible from above, as it never could be from within: boughs spiralled out in all directions, splitting into smaller loops and whorls. Tymon caught a glimpse of a complex, vertiginous symmetry. From the gigantic scale to the most intimate, the world seemed to be
drawn in the same pattern, spiral upon spiral, helix into helix, infinitely growing and diminishing. The vision lasted only a moment. The machine shuddered and dipped its nose sickeningly downwards; the wind rushed past his ears and he gripped at the sides of the cockpit, closing his eyes.
When he opened them again he saw that they had lost a great deal of altitude. Ahead of them, cradled between the supporting branch and the mass of the trunk, Argos city stood out like a pale, luminous flower, glimmering in the dusk with a thousand Festival lights. They had agreed not to fly too close for fear of discovery, and Galliano kept the machine at a respectable distance from the town, veering east. Tymon stared at the faraway buildings and tried to imagine how he could ever have been impressed with the grandeur of the place. The coloured stalls and pavilions on the air-harbour resembled decorated sweetmeats on a plate, and the temple Hall on the buttress was a child’s toy. He made out the green College pavilion at the western end of the quays. He was thrown against the side of the cockpit once more as Galliano pulled on the lever and the machine changed course again. This time they were caught in an updraft and the air-chariot rocked dangerously forward. It occurred to Tymon that he did not know whether he would manage to hang on in the event the craft flipped completely. He hooked an arm around one of the support beams, bracing himself.
‘Witless creature that I am!’ cried Galliano frantically, struggling with the steering rods. ‘Hold on to something, Tymon!’
After a few heart-churning dips the machine regained balance and they swerved to safety, speeding away from the city.
‘We need straps in this thing, not maps,’ sighed the old man, shaking his head.
The town disappeared behind them and they puttered on in a wide arc over the leaf-forests, looping back towards Galliano’s workshop. The light was failing and the sky had turned a deep, fathomless blue. The brightest evening star, the Friend, appeared directly overhead. With a shiver, Tymon felt the vastness of the world. The stars looked as if they were somehow further away from a height—not the benign ‘fruits of heaven’ he had been taught about in Treeology, but brilliant, burning orbs in an unimaginably distant void. He turned his eyes back to the comfort of the fading west. He judged by the light that the eighth hour had come and gone. As exhilarating as the flight had been, he realised he would be glad to feel the solid bark beneath his feet. It was late and they still had much to do to prepare for their departure the next day. His head buzzed with schemes and stratagems for the journey to Lantria. There was the matter of procuring more food and better equipment, now that he had a clearer idea of the length of the voyage; he wondered whether it might be possible to restock their supplies, and wished once again, in vain, for the valuable flask of ether oil.
At last he made out the windmill’s ragged silhouette on the top of Galliano’s knot. With a slow thrill of shock, he noticed lights twinkling like fireflies on the slope beside it. A line of people bearing torches stood on the path outside the workshop. Some already waited beside the tumbledown wall and more were mounting the knot in an unbroken string. The brief expedition in the air-chariot had drawn an audience, after all.
‘Already?’ Galliano joked, feebly. ‘I didn’t think we’d get away with nobody noticing, but I must say I wasn’t expecting our admirers to be here so soon.’
He dampened the engine and inflated the ether balloon under the craft, allowing the machine to drift the last hundred yards or so down to the knot. They floated in eerie silence towards the flickering torches. A formless suspicion gripped Tymon.
‘Turn around, Apu,’ he begged. ‘Let’s leave now, while we still can.’
The old man shook his head forlornly. ‘No more fuel, boy,’ he whispered. ‘I left the extra barrels at the workshop.’
Tymon grasped with steadily mounting dismay that the figures by the workshop were priests. All the members of the Council were present on the knot, along with a throng of ordinary townsfolk. He recognised the Dean among the waiting crowd, a gaunt, unsmiling figure, and his spirits plummeted to his toes. The game was up, he thought. His absence from the seminary had been found out and his tutors were there to retrieve him. The priests’ faces were severe. He reflected gloomily on the punishments likely to be meted out to him and tried to imagine how long his trip with Galliano would have to be postponed. There was now no question of helping the pilgrim girl.
‘Payback,’ murmured Galliano as they touched down on the knot.
The perfect descent barely registered. Tymon climbed out of the craft and made his way slowly up the slope beside his mentor, resigned to being chastised in front of half the town. Father Mossing detached himself from the group of priests and stepped forwards to meet them. He held up a leaf-scroll to the torchlight.
‘Let it be duly noted by witnesses,’ he proclaimed, ‘that on the twenty-first day of the seventh month, this Year of the Root, the Council declares Jonas Galliano guilty of grievous heresy and a danger to his fellow citizens.’
Tymon stopped short in confusion. These were not the words he had been expecting to hear. He realised with a rush of shame that he had thought only of his own punishment, not of the scientist’s. His pulse quickened as two members of the Council Guard left the line of onlookers and positioned themselves officiously on each side of Galliano, brandishing their hardwood pikes.
‘What are you doing?’ he protested to one of the soldiers. ‘He’s just an old man. He’s no threat to anyone.’
The man ignored him, lifting his chin and adjusting his uniform self-consciously.
‘Moreover, since the accused has been found to be a corrupting influence on young minds,’ continued Mossing, ‘he must face immediate trial. Take him away.’
The guards began to propel Galliano down the path with their pikes. The scientist appeared ridiculously small beside his hulking custodians. He looked back at Tymon one last time.
‘Goodbye, my friend,’ he called. ‘Don’t ever trade your wings in for a lie like I did!’
‘Wait!’ cried the boy. ‘It isn’t heresy, just science!’
His confusion gave way to panic. The townsfolk must have somehow heard of Galliano’s plan to enter the Storm, he thought. They should be told the truth, made to understand that the old man had given up on his suicidal notion. He ran after the soldiers.
‘He wasn’t going to do it!’ he exclaimed. ‘He was going to Lantria instead!’
Someone caught his arm and pulled him back. He fell in fury on this adversary, kicking and flailing. More hands took hold of him. At last he was forced to remain motionless, cursing the people around him to the roots of Hell.
‘Green grace, you really have been exposed to bad influences,’ observed a mild voice behind Tymon. ‘If going to Lantria seems preferable to what you were planning originally then it’s about time this nonsense was stopped.’
The grip of his captors relaxed and he was allowed to turn around. There stood Father Fallow, calm as a coiled snake. At his elbow hovered a glowering and defiant Wick. At the sight of his friend, understanding hit Tymon with the full force of a blow. He thought, with a wrench, of the number of guild-meetings the other boy had been called to, far more than any leaf-binding apprenticeship would warrant. He berated himself for being a trusting fool. Every one of his confidences must have found their way through Wick to the Dean, from the scrawled note in the study hall to his dreamy plans of escape. He had simply been allowed to leave the seminary that night, allowed to accompany Galliano, the better to ensnare the old scientist. He turned on his classmate in furious disappointment.
‘You were reporting on me all along!’ he burst out. ‘Some friend.’
‘You lied to me,’ retorted Wick. ‘You were barred from the Rites for talking to a pilgrim. You didn’t see fit to tell me that, did you? What were you going to do? Give the dirty foreigner a ride in that Hell-machine?’
Tymon felt his heart constrict. For a terrible moment he feared that the worst had happened, that his plan had been exposed and the pilgrim girl�
��s identity discovered. But as Wick looked away with an angry shrug, he realised that the accusation had only been a gibe. The other boy had spoken the truth inadvertently, in a fit of spite.
‘Now, now,’ admonished Fallow. ‘There is no betrayal here, only wisdom. You were about to make the worst choice of your life, Tymon, and associate yourself with a man who has proven himself to be a dangerous deviant. Your friend did you a favour.’
Tymon scowled at his toes and made no answer. The hours since his dawn awakening seemed long; like the dream that morning, his youthful assumptions had dissolved and drained away, leaving a sense of disillusionment. He wondered what rewards had been offered to Wick in exchange for his duplicity. In the world of adulthood, it seemed, trust and loyalty had no place. Only power mattered.
The Dean addressed the curious bystanders that had gathered near the machine.
‘The heretic Jonas Galliano has made a mechanical abomination,’ he announced. ‘He has constructed a craft that goes without wind and flies without ether. He has flouted natural law and sought to win over young and impressionable minds to his degenerate pursuits. This will not be tolerated.’
Wick had turned away, his mouth twisted in a bitter smile, and seemed about to slope off, to lose himself in the anonymity of the crowd. But Father Fallow did not let him go so easily. He laid a light, irresistible hand on his shoulder.
‘You must appreciate,’ he sighed as his melancholy gaze settled on Tymon again, ‘that your comrade here had to think of his own future. He could not be a party to such grave transgressions and remain silent. If he reported your activities, it was to give you both a second chance.’
He loosed his hold on Wick. The other boy cast a brief, haunted look behind him then plunged into the crowd. Tymon swallowed a dangerous tightness in his throat.
‘But Father Galliano’s done me no harm,’ he pleaded. ‘He was only trying out a new kind of dirigible. He was going to take me to Lantria. He would have sponsored me.’
Tymon's Flight Page 13