Tymon stumbled out of the Dean’s office building and onto the College quadrangle, stopping a moment by the library steps to catch his breath. His front of glowering indifference had barely lasted through the interview with Fallow. The afternoon shadows edged across the quiet buildings and the air was full of the high chirping of fruit bats nesting in the slope of the branch above the seminary. He stared vacantly upwards for a few minutes then realised he was trembling with shock.
Ever since the night on the knot, he had been unable bear the Dean’s presence. Humiliation, anger and a sense of aching loss choked him every time he was in Fallow’s company, and his only defence was surly silence. The priest’s sarcasm hurt him more than he cared to admit. His mind seemed to go to pieces under his withering scorn. The smell of burning Tree-gall filled his nostrils once again and the memory of his futile act of defiance returned to haunt him. Though he had never been punished for the minor heresy of spitting on the Head of the College, Tymon read his sentence clearly in the service pass. He held it up to the light with unsteady fingers. The Dean’s writing crawled like a spider across the bottom: Marak. The name reverberated with unpleasant associations. It was a place of convicts and undesirables, a destination when all other options had been exhausted. No fortune or glory ever came out of Marak.
The irony of being sent to his fate on the very greatship he had so often dreamed about was not lost on Tymon. The voyage was the zest in his cup of bitterness. Though he had always fantasised about travelling, his idea had been to visit romantic and exciting places—the magnificent shipyards of Lantria, or the rich and barbaric northern fifes, where it was said no man had less than seven wives. Marak was a drought-infested military outpost on the fringes of the Eastern Canopy. It did not even have the allure of history, being a new settlement built to protect the trade route between Argos and its colonies. The voyage aboard the greatship was a reminder of just how much he would miss by being indentured to the College for two more years. His service stretched out before him like a prison sentence.
He walked across the empty courtyard, a lone figure in the sunlight. His classmates had all left the seminary earlier that week. Bolas had begun his apprenticeship at an architect’s trade in the city and Piri had gone back to work on his family’s keep for the summer. As for Wick, he had disappeared for two weeks after the heresy trial, sent home, it was said, for health reasons. When he had returned to the seminary there was no further pretence of a leaf-binding apprenticeship: he was wearing the dark green robes of the priesthood. His full initiation to the rank of acolyte had taken place soon afterwards. After that, he no longer slept or ate with the other novices, spending most of his time cloistered at the monastery or studying in the College library. He had hardly exchanged a word with his classmates since his return. Tymon had not been given the opportunity to confront or forgive his former ally.
He approached the kitchen compound and ducked through the narrow entrance. The garden beyond was deserted. Margeese whistled nervously in their pen as he passed.
‘Amu!’ he called across the compound.
The answer came from within the kitchen building. ‘Here, my sprout.’
Masha appeared in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. Today her round, kindly face bore the marks of anxiety. She emerged with a brisk attempt at humour.
‘So, what did that old killjoy have to say? Did he set you to work in the screaming shillee-pens, or award you an apprenticeship peeling frogapples?’
She eased herself down with an explosive sigh onto the steps leading up to the kitchen door. Tymon sat down beside her, his gaze fixed miserably on the dusty floor of the compound.
‘What have they said to you?’ she exclaimed. ‘Out with it!’
‘They have no use for me here,’ he said. ‘The Dean gave me a service pass for Marak. Leaving tomorrow at dawn on the Stargazer.’
Masha’s mouth contracted. ‘Green grace,’ she said, turning her face from him.
She sounded so dismal that Tymon took her work-worn hands in his own to comfort her. She squeezed his fingers silently. As a child the old cook had seemed to him huge and indestructible, a force to be reckoned with. Now she was somehow shrunken and fragile. He contemplated her frumpy, familiar form, her serviceable sleeves rolled up to her elbows and the grey hairs escaping her headscarf in handfuls. He saw with surprise that her cheeks were wet with tears.
‘Are you all right, Amu?’ he asked gently.
‘Don’t you worry about me,’ she said, wiping the offending liquid angrily with a corner of her apron. ‘I’m a foolish old woman. Listen, you promise me you’ll take good care of yourself in that fly-hole, you hear? Promise.’ She hugged him fiercely, mumbling a torrent of advice into his neck. ‘Only eat boiled greens. And make sure you get bird-meat: I hear they cook monkey and snake in Marak. Don’t touch their dirty animals. And don’t drink their kush, it makes Argosians ill.’
‘I will,’ he answered. ‘I mean I won’t.’ He suddenly felt like laughing. A light, defiant mood took him. ‘I’ll be fine, Amu. Don’t be upset.’ He patted her back awkwardly. ‘I’ll make my fortune in Tree-spice and buy you your own house on Temple road.’
She laughed then too, through her tears, and pinched his cheeks and called him her little captain, as she had when he was a boy. Tymon realised with a pang that he would miss her. Although she could only counsel him to resignation, her kindness had been a balm in the hard days following the loss of Galliano, when he had been laid up with fever in the College ward. During his illness she had cared for him and visited him daily; his battle had been successful thanks in great part to her efforts.
Lying alone that night in his hammock, the only occupant of the forsaken dormitory, he tried to summon up his first childhood memory. He expected it to be a kitchen scene, the warm enveloping perfume of Masha’s skirts or the sound of lentils on a tray. But although there were many such recollections, they were not the earliest. Something else lingered behind them—remembered a kind voice crooning over him, a shadowy figure gathering him up in the folds of a cloak. He could not recall if the voice and figure belonged to a woman or a man.
10
Tymon arrived at the city gates in the dark hour before sunrise, hugging his small bundle of belongings—a change of clothes wrapped in a worsted blanket Masha had given him, all he had in the way of worldly possessions. A sleepy guard slouched to the far end of the gate-tunnel to open the postern for him. He stepped onto the quays, shivering in the pre-dawn chill. The door thudded to on his heels. The Stargazer could be seen towering over the other dirigibles in the air-harbour, a giant looming shape above the central docks. Ether sacks lined her hull like storm clouds. He craned his neck to stare up at the sheer bulk of her sides. Already she was a hive of activity, with boxes and bales being loaded up a gangplank and into her hold. Sailors whistled and called to each other in her rigging. He was about to move towards the hurrying figures when he heard his name shouted out across the docks.
‘Tymon. Wait up.’
The well-known figure of Bolas strode towards him on the boardwalk. His old schoolfellow had a bundle of hardwood planks slung over one shoulder. He laid down his burden and stood awkwardly before Tymon, twisting his brown apprentice’s apron around his hands.
‘Masha told me you were off this morning,’ he said with a shy smile. ‘I wanted to say goodbye—to wish you the best of luck in the service, and all.’
‘Thank you, Bolas.’
Tymon was assailed by a sense of regret and could barely smile at his friend in return. Of all his former companions at the seminary, Bolas was the only one who had never lied to him, or turned his back on him after the trial. It was doubly mortifying to think that he had shrugged off that one real friendship in favour of Wick’s.
‘Same to you,’ he rushed on. ‘I’m really happy things have worked out for you. You’re a full citizen now, and an architect! Your old man must be proud.’
A shadow passed over Bolas’ round face at t
he mention of citizenship. ‘You didn’t miss anything, you know,’ he mumbled. ‘The Rites, I mean. Pointless. Not worth all the fuss.’
Tymon nodded mutely. He did not trust himself to speak. Bolas picked up the bundle of planks. Before moving away, however, he half-turned towards Tymon again and spoke in a low voice.
‘I wanted to tell you while I had the chance,’ he muttered. ‘I never believed the old scientist meant any harm. It was wrong to do what they did to him. There’s more than one of us in the city who thinks that, you know. You take care of yourself, Ty, and come home safe.’
Then he turned and stomped off along the west quays. Tymon was almost inclined to call him back. But he did not know what he would say if he did, and could only watch his friend’s solid, reliable form diminish in the distance. After a while he made his way, slowly and with a heavy heart, towards the sailors loading up the Stargazer.
The season voyage that departed that morning for Marak was one of only four trips to the Eastern Domains all year. If the winds were favourable, the greatship would plot a course through the wild leaf-forests between Argos and its colony in a monthlong journey, navigating the hot and cold air-currents that flowed like rivers between the branches of the Tree. The trip was difficult once the winter rains began, and impossible at the height of summer, when the trade winds failed. Season voyages were therefore something of a gamble for the ship’s captain. The time of departure was crucial. Tymon waited for an opportunity to speak to someone on the cargo bay, but there was such an atmosphere of grim concentration among the crew that none of them took any notice of him. At last he approached a cross-eyed, burly sailor shouting orders to the other men. The fellow clutched a wad of torn leaves on which he scribbled figures with a worn reed pen, his lazy eye rolling sideways over the page. Another pen was wedged behind his ear; several more poked out of a pocket in his breeches.
‘Please, sir,’ Tymon began. He was interrupted by a long piercing whistle from the burly man, directed up to the activity in the hold.
‘Not there, you bleary fools…Up, over the water kegs…Yes, on top…No, on top, you pasty-faced morons…’
‘Please, sir,’ Tymon tried again, ‘could you help me? I have a working pass—’
The sailor ignored him completely, starting forwards with a bark of annoyance towards the door of the hold. Tymon had no alternative but to trot after him.
‘On top,’ the other reiterated, jabbing the air with his pen. ‘I don’t care if you don’t think it fits Aran, make it fit.’
Tymon took a breath and tried again, tentatively holding out his travel pass from the Dean. ‘Sir. I have working passage on the Stargazer. Where should I go?’
There was a sudden silence. The sailor fixed Tymon for the first time with his good eye, his face suffused with an expression of mock surprise. Someone somewhere stifled a laugh.
‘Well, look what we have here, by the beauty! A working passage, eh? Then how come you aren’t doing any work? What do I look like, a charity institution?’
Tymon started at the vehemence of this speech. A youth standing nearby heaved up a bale of barley vine and threw it straight at him with a wide grin. It caught him awkwardly in the ribs, knocking the air from his lungs. He struggled to hold onto it at the same time as keeping a grip on his own bundle. Laughter rippled through the group of workers.
‘Move it!’ roared the man with the pens, and everyone sprang into action again.
Tymon staggered off with the bale up the gangplank, handing his load to the lanky, toothless crewman waiting in the hold. He was greeted with a broad wink and a gummy smile.
‘You’ll soon get used to the captain,’ the toothless sailor whispered. ‘He screams worse than he bites.’ Louder he added, ‘I’m Aran, first mate here on the Stargazer. That devil who threw you the bale is Misho—pay no heed to him, he’s more than half a Jay.’
‘Did I say, “stop and chat”?’ stormed the captain from below, pens bristling. ‘Move, move, move!’
An hour later the last of the boxes were stowed in the hold and the Stargazer was ready to drop her moorings. The crewmembers climbed high in the rigging, whistling signals to each other and pushing the dirigible loose from the dock with long wooden poles. Tymon stood on deck as the greatship was coaxed out of the air-harbour. The experience was completely different from riding in Galliano’s wheezing, convulsing engine. The only sound accompanying the Stargazer’s passage was the occasional hiss of ether: the greatship was heavy and graceful, both beautiful and powerful. The dawn breeze picked up and the sails billowed out taut. Slowly, the Stargazer swung round over the West Chasm. The captain boomed an order and a second set of sackcloth balloons inflated around the hull. The ship rose in stately splendour, its prow facing due east.
At that moment the first rays of morning sun pierced the leaf-forests immediately above the city, and a long bright beam of light came to rest with uncanny precision on the roof of the Temple, standing out on its buttress. As if in answer, the sound that had greeted Tymon every morning since he could remember pealed out from the seminary. The bells sent up the call to prayer, clanging over the city in dull repetition. As the dirigible picked up speed and the town receded below them, the harsh notes seemed to reach after the boy like grasping fingers. They rang on and on, echoing off the trunk-wall; he felt that the noise would never stop, never let him go. The din became unbearable to him and he crouched down on a corner of the deck, covering his ears. The first mate found him sitting there long after the bells had ceased tolling, his ears still resolutely plugged. He was given a stiff warning against laziness and sent to receive his orders from the captain.
On first sight, Captain Safah exemplified the typical hard-nosed Lantrian businessman, notorious for parsimony. He set Tymon to work as a swab, keeping careful note of the hours he spent at each task, the food he ate and the supplies he used. The boy had the distinct impression that if any of his requirements exceeded a certain, very frugal sum, Safah would hold him personally responsible for the difference. His days passed in a grinding tedium of labour. He cleaned the entire deck of the ship, the cabins, the hold and the galley, scrimping and saving each shred of soap. He peeled and sliced more frogapples than he thought possible in a lifetime. The novelty of flying in a huge dirigible soon wore off and the changeless galley diet began to pall on him. He came to abhor the smell of lentil soup.
The Stargazer was built more like a floating fortress than a dirigible. From the tip of her prow to the high towers on her stern, she was bolstered against the world’s winds by a tough, resilient shell of bark. Her masts were of the strongest hardwood harvested from Lantrian Tree-mines, her sails great sections of heavy leaf-canvas. Three large reinforced balloons assured her buoyancy. Directional ether jets could be released from barrels at her stern and a squadron of smaller sacks inflated and emptied for vertical movement. A complete set of spares hung at her sides, ready to replace a torn or missing sack at a moment’s notice. The whole effect was one of a huge, stately dowager in gathered skirts, moving through the sky with surprising speed. Tymon had never seen such a quantity of polished hardwood and billowing sackcloth, and it seemed as if he was going to have to clean every inch of it.
There were certain advantages to his duties above deck, however. He was able, during his long hours of stair-scrubbing, and wall- and mast- and sail-scrubbing, to keep a surreptitious eye on the vista unfolding beneath the ship. For the first few days the Stargazer passed over a familiar panorama of leaf-forests, carefully terraced branches and vine plantations. Safah took a bowed course about the circumference of the Central Canopy, following a strong southeasterly air-current that swept them towards their goal. They flew at a steady altitude just above the leaf-tips during the day and spent the nights moored in the safety of the lower twigs. About six days into the voyage they put down in the market town of Ethis, where they traded hardwood for water and fresh food. The settlement was built in a steep trench between two vertical branches, the houses carved dire
ctly into the walls of bark. Doors and windows gaped like myriad blind eyes from the sides of the trench. Tymon could not help thinking, with a shudder, of the Divine Mouth far away in Argos city. The market town seemed plunged in a green gloom to his unaccustomed vision, and its residents struck him as equally dim and gloomy, in keeping with their surroundings. He was glad when the barter was done and the ship returned to the sunlit world above the leaves.
For he began, in spite of himself, to relish his new existence. The departure from the world of the priests turned out to be a true liberation. No one on the dirigible cared beyond a joke or two where his family came from, or whether he had any lack of it. The rigour of the days tired out his body and his nights were spent in untroubled slumber. The knife-edge of his experiences at the seminary grew dull. There was certainly more to life aboard the Stargazer than backbreaking routine: in the mild summer evenings, when the dirigible descended into the creaking, swaying leaves for the night, the sailors would gather for an hour of relaxation on the stern deck, playing cards or dice for money. Tymon had no riches to squander on gambling but watched his fellows from the edge of the group, and soon learned to trade insults and banter with the best of them. He found the men on the ship gruff but essentially kind.
Although the Stargazer was an Argosian vessel, its crew hailed from the Four Canopies, for few of Tymon’s countrymen wished to make a living far from home. Only the first mate, Aran, had been born anywhere near Argos city. The boy heard several Lantrian accents on board as well as the dialect of the Jay folk, a nomadic tribe of actors and musicians barely tolerated in his home town. The ship’s cook, his taciturn companion in the galley, was a sallow-skinned barbarian from the North Fringes. The stocky northerner’s greasy cooking spoke of cold winters and spice rationing. But once a seemingly inexhaustible pile of frogapples had been boiled for syrup, and the next day’s lentil soup prepared, even Cook—Tymon never found out his real name—emerged on the stern deck of an evening to join the others. There he would conduct a game of dice in comfortable silence, almost always going away the winner.
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