‘You! Into the hatch. And this time stay out of trouble,’ Safah growled.
He thrust the lantern and the cloth at Tymon, who nodded, took the guttering light and limped back to the shelter of the hatchway. Behind him, the two men tipped the empty crate over the railing. It fell soundlessly into the night.
By dawn the next morning the fury of the gale was spent. The boy arrived on deck to find the ship washed clean for him and an eggshell-blue sky glistening overhead. The Stargazer drifted above the canopy at a slight angle, one sail torn and fluttering in the breeze. They had outrun the storm, though the winds had taken their toll on the dirigible. Where the two starboard life-craft should have been, there was now only a flapping hole in the rigging. The sailors gathered together on that side of the ship, whispering among themselves and pointing at the severed ropes in dismay. Tymon hurried to the place where he had dropped the crate the night before. To his relief, the portside balloons were still safe, their covers intact. Samiha might be in either one of them.
He peered furtively under the cover of one of the vessels, an eye cocked on the men on the opposite side of the deck. The basket was empty. The sailors’ voices erupted in a babble of protest, bemoaning the loss of the life-craft. He felt a sudden misgiving.
‘Calm down.’ Aran’s voice rose through the clamour, reassuring the crew. ‘We’ll be in Marak in a few hours. They might not have ether in the colonies, but they won’t have forgotten how to weave a basket or sew a seam.’
Tymon sidled over to the last balloon. He knew before he lifted the canvas that the pilgrim girl would be gone. The vacant interior of the basket gaped at him as he twitched aside the covering, and he wondered why she had not simply used the balloon she had first hidden in; why she had taken the trouble of cutting one loose from the other side of the ship. Then he noticed something lying in a far corner of the basket. He reached under the canvas, straining towards the object. With a dull click of hardwood he drew out a set of keys on a ring, of a kind commonly used in Argos city. They were immediately identifiable. Inside the ring, painted in dirty white letters, ran the inscription: If found, please return to. The subsequent words, Argos municipal prison, had been painstakingly blacked out with what looked like dry Tree-gum. These were Samiha’s prison keys, the ones that she had stolen from the guards. She had left them for him.
If it was a message, it was not one that he could understand. The key ring lay in the palm of his hand, a big enigmatic ‘o’, meaning everything and nothing. He slipped it into his tunic pocket and walked over to the starboard rail, scrutinising the calm blue horizon. The life-craft was nowhere to be seen. Where was she now? Had she managed to safely navigate the tempest, or was she scuttled on some remote leaf-island? He gazed out over the expanse of the Eastern Canopy for the first time in the light of day, trying to revel in the knowledge that he had helped her escape. He felt only a sense of abandonment.
He shielded his eyes against the glare of the rising sun. There was something unsettling about the view from the deck-rail, an insistent and niggling detail that upset his sense of proportion. He had been too preoccupied to notice it before. He blinked in disbelief at the Treescape. He had heard of the fact but forgotten it in the turmoil of his arrival: the branches of the Eastern Canopy were bare. No leaves clad the naked limbs beneath the dirigible. Skeletal twigs gaped openly at the sky; bare boughs wound, arid and shorn, into the distance. It was as if the Storm itself had risen up and whipped the greenery away, leaving only the sad grey bones of the world behind.
12
Everyone on the greatship had their own theory about the Eastern Canopy and expressed it loudly as the ship sped over the acres of leafless twigs. God had withdrawn Her blessings from the East, the sailors affirmed. No Sap flowed through Her veins to give life to its inhabitants. Even the rains were scarce by divine decree. The consensus aboard the Stargazer was that Easterners were lazy and immoral and that the colonies were fighting a losing battle against chaos. The Nurian natives were thieves at worst, beggars at best, clamouring for Argosian handouts.
‘Marak is a hole of iniquity in a rotten blanket,’ the Captain announced, mixing his metaphors without compunction as he trudged past Tymon on the deck that morning. He added a dash of scripture for good measure. ‘For thou shalt flee the domain of the unbeliever and fear his mercy even as thou dost fear his wrath.’
Normal duties were suspended in favour of sewing in the wake of the storm, and the boy sat cross-legged on the rain-washed boards with the rest of the crew, patching up the torn and punctured ether sacks. He eyed the Captain warily. Safah liked to impart reams of doctrinal wisdom to his crew but might count the time spent listening to it against their food allowance. The thrifty Lantrian appeared to have other plans in mind for the day, however.
‘Seek ye not friendship with him, for he hath drunk of his own Mother’s blood, even to Her death,’ he pontificated, before stamping into his cabin. Tymon stared after him in puzzlement: he was not entirely familiar with the colourful episodes of Lantrian holy writ.
‘Who wants to be friends,’ muttered Misho from nearby. ‘Easterners stink, they don’t know how to wash themselves. And their women have no honour.’
‘The old Nurians drilled too deep,’ Aran explained for Tymon’s benefit as he tore off a section of sackcloth into an expert square. ‘They mined for Treesap till they sucked the canopy dry. They used special contraptions—you can see what’s left of one, over there.’ He jerked his chin at the view beyond the deck rails. ‘Wind-wells, they were called. Sucked up the Sap faster than it could flow.’
Tymon followed his gaze, scrutinising the alien world that stretched out naked and unapologetic beneath the dirigible. The flight through the night had shortened their journey; Aran had assured him that they would arrive at the colonial capital no later than noon that day. Until now there had been nothing to indicate it, no hint of life in the desolate branches. The bare twig-thickets extended in all directions, grey and dismal, swelling gently towards the canopy’s summit. The only marks of human civilisation Tymon had yet seen were the miles of barkwood canal that wound alongside their course: rain-catchers, the sailors called them, though most seemed to be dry and in various states of disrepair. Now, as he lifted his eyes to the grey desolation, he caught sight of other structures, abandoned pulleys and great wheels covered in torn webbing mounted on platforms among the twigs. They stood out against the sky like monstrous distortions of Galliano’s workshop.
‘After a while God lost patience with them,’ Aran continued cheerily. ‘She gave them no more Sap and no Tree-water. They farmed using the rain-catchers for a while, but lately the rain isn’t enough. They trade us their precious attar, their Tree-spice, for a barrel of our rainwater.’
‘Why don’t they just leave?’ Tymon mumbled, more forlornly than he had intended. He wrestled his needle through the stubborn sackcloth.
He could not help feeling nonplussed at Samiha’s sudden departure, as well as anxious about her safety. He was alone again, with no prospect but his mission service looming over him. It seemed harsh to lose his damsel in distress just when he was warming to his heroic role. He could no longer help her; she had slipped away from him once more. All that remained of her were the keys. The hardwood ring lay hidden in his pocket, reassuringly solid, proof that he had not dreamt up his adventures with the red-headed spy. Perhaps she meant for the two of them to meet again in Marak, he thought. He mentally compared the speeds of the balloon and the dirigible and calculated when she might arrive in the city, only half-listening to the sailors’ discussion.
His reaction bewildered the first mate.
‘Leave? What do you mean, leave?’ demanded the toothless sailor. ‘Where else would they go? Even if they tried to leave, there’s no ether left to float the dirigibles. Argosian ships are the only ones flying to Marak. Besides, they hung the hammock, let ‘em lie in it, I say. Why should we save them?’
‘Don’t they want to save themselves?’ Tymo
n replied without thinking. ‘Don’t they want freedom from Argos?’
Misho gave a low whistle of astonishment and applied himself with renewed diligence to his work. Aran glanced at Tymon curiously.
‘Where d’you hear that?’ he asked.
The boy shrugged in embarrassment, aware that he had said too much. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Isn’t there a rebellion in Marak, or something?’
‘A few crazy zealots don’t qualify as a rebellion,’ noted the sailor. He cleared his throat and leaned towards Tymon, speaking softly. ‘You’d do well not to talk too much about rebels while you’re in Marak. First of all, the Governor isn’t friendly towards us home-borns right now, and comments like that can get you into trouble. Second, these so-called rebels are nothing but troublemakers. They don’t want freedom. They just want to create as much grief and chaos as possible. Mark my words.’
Tymon nodded, feeling like a fool for his indiscretion. He would have to be more careful in the future, he realised. He was an Argosian on his mission service and a direct representative of the seminary. If he was to have any chance of carrying on his friendship with Samiha, he would have to be a model of caution in the colonies.
By noon the bare knots and exposed branches of the canopy were showing signs of habitation at last. Sections of sackcloth had been stretched from twig to twig for dew farming, and dirty white sheets wound between the bare thickets like the webbing of some gigantic, erratic spider. In these were grown the only crops that could easily bear drought: melata beans, the eastern staple crop, and shortwheat, a bitter, grassy grain used for flour and fermented to make the local beer. Tymon scanned the huts and platforms huddled under the shade of the dew-fields. Thin figures stopped their work to watch the greatship pass by and tiny, pot-bellied children waved and shouted in faraway voices. There was a sense of unreality to the naked canopy and its inhabitants. He searched the dreary vista through the deck-rails for a glimpse of the city. But it was sound, not sight, that welcomed him to the fabled kingdom of Nur.
The sun had just passed its zenith when he heard it. The call to prayer floated towards him on the breeze—not a clamour of bells, but a single voice chanting. The hairs on Tymon’s neck prickled and he scrambled to his feet on the deck, as if summoned to attention. The disembodied voice reached out to him from the hazy space ahead, from the future. The sound was both strange and intimately familiar. Though the words of the chant were in Nurian and incomprehensible, the melody was well known to him. It was the First Liturgy, the psalm sung at the start of every temple ritual in Argos.
I saw the shape of God
Like to a mighty Tree…
The dirigible flew above a crest in the twig-forests and over a wide basin, a dip in the general level of the canopy. The lookout gave his cry. Before them, in the grey heart of the hollow, lay the colonial outpost of Marak.
It was far from beautiful. The three shabby tiers of the town clung like pale lichen to a minor limb in a cheap parody of Argos city. The bough supporting the outpost was relatively small, a subsidiary branch only five hundred feet wide. Beyond the highest tier of buildings it split off into ever-narrowing conduits topped by clumps of ungainly bare twigs. Rank upon rank of the leafless twig-thickets extended about the city, closing off the horizon. The houses were crowded together too, the narrow buildings competing for space behind a rough palisade. A sprawling edifice, marked by its gaudy pomp as the Governor’s palace, dominated the highest level of the town, and rows of bright yellow military barracks proliferated along the air-harbour like mould. Behind them, to the south, a tent city spread in a fetid jumble, petering out where the supporting branch turned vertical and plunged steeply downwards. A disagreeable smell wafted towards Tymon on the deck and he saw that compost-cloths bulged beneath the air-harbour quays. The call to prayer faded on the breeze, dissolved in the face of dull reality. Marak was unclean and unenchanting.
Safah’s barked orders sent the crew scurrying to their posts as the ship descended towards the city. A short while later the Stargazer’s magnificent bulk towered over the dilapidated docks, and Tymon was consigned to the hold, passing boxes and barrels out of the main cargo hatch. He realised that hiding Samiha in these circumstances would have been almost impossible. It was just as well that she had made her getaway. He heard the commotion of many voices echoing dimly through the walls of the hull as he worked, and wondered what was happening outside on the quays. But it was only after the last box was whisked to the safety of the custom house that the pace on the dirigible slackened, and he was able to return above deck once more to satisfy his curiosity.
A chorus of voices sang out as he peered over the port railing.
‘Missa! Missa! Job need doing? Hey, Argosi!’
Pale faces gazed up from the docks, a mass of dirty white flecks. The air-harbour was teeming with humanity. Tymon stared at the people jostling each other by the side of the greatship: he had never witnessed such a crowd welcoming an ordinary merchant dirigible in Argos city, nor had he ever seen so many foreigners together in one place. The Nurians in Marak seemed no better off, or cleaner, than those who left to go on pilgrimage.
‘Missa! Need stay? Need girl?’ the voices cried.
‘Quiet, you scum.’
The order cut through the chorus like a lash. Colonial soldiers patrolled the docks. Some of them pushed individual members of the crowd away from the greatship with their short, heavy clubs.
‘Move along, Nurry,’ they jeered, flattening their vowels, an echo of Father Rede. ‘That’s it, nice and easy.’
Tymon was astounded. These soldiers were utterly different from the sentries in Argos city. They were cruel and efficient and there were a great many of them. They had cordoned off the main way up to the town, as well as the area between the Stargazer and the custom house a little further along the quays. He thought better of calling out a merry answer to the massed faces below, and retreated from the rail.
‘Hey, choirboy, quit wasting space,’ yelled Misho, emerging from the door to the hold. ‘Message from the first mate: you’re done and docked. Go see the captain. And don’t talk to the natives if you want to live, frog-wit.’
Tymon only shrugged in answer and sauntered off to the captain’s quarters. He found Safah seated at his desk, deep in one of his metaphysical moods. The Lantrian’s notebooks lay idle on the table before him and he chewed meditatively on one of his pens, his dreamy eye rolling to starboard.
‘The path to heaven is tortuous,’ he sighed as the boy entered his office. ‘Well, it’s a sad sight, this place. I wish I wasn’t leaving you here, aye—I’d offer you work myself if I could. But adversity shall call the true believer! Yea,’ he intoned in his best scripture voice, signing Tymon’s work pass and handing it back to him with a flourish, ‘the seeker of truth shall walk through the very Maelstrom of Hell. Take this to Father Verlain and go in beauty, young one. We’ll see you again in two years, eh?’
‘In the beauty, Captain,’ answered Tymon.
The words stuck in his throat. He suddenly felt very fondly towards the belligerent Lantrian, though he was in no hurry now to sign his future away to the greatship. Samiha had given him a glimpse of something larger. The pilgrim girl and her mysterious friends in Marak inhabited a sphere more exotic than anything he had yet experienced; even the remote chance of meeting her again was intoxicating.
‘Well, go on then,’ snorted Safah, his squint eye searching a corner of the cabin. ‘Ask Aran or someone to tell you the way to the mission. But don’t look for salvation in these parts.’
Tymon was given a lively farewell by his crewmates, who threw frogapple peels and light-hearted insults after him as he walked down the gangplank. Creaking on its moorings, the dirigible seemed familiar and safe, a lost haven. The fact that Marak was host to the seminary mission as well as being Samiha’s home, and that he was about to officially begin his indenture service, weighed with sudden heaviness on his spirits. As he stepped onto the quays a sense of difference, of be
ing completely alien, descended on him like a shroud. The crowd of onlookers surged behind the soldiers’ cordon. An officer detached himself from the line, striding towards him. The militiaman had a cold slab of a face. He blocked Tymon’s path with both his girth and frigid lack of cordiality.
‘Pass, please,’ he snapped.
Tymon gave him his signed travel document. The man threw a cursory glance over it.
‘How long will you be staying in Marak city.’ He spoke as if the question were a statement, with no inflection in his voice.
‘Two years, sir.’ The boy fidgeted in embarrassment.
‘For what purpose are you sojourning in Marak city.’
‘It says on the pass, sir—’
‘For what purpose are you sojourning in Marak city.’
‘My mission service, sir.’
The soldier’s lip curled into a faint sneer. ‘You’ll be going straight to the Argosian mission, then. It’s near the second tier temple. Proceed.’
He handed the pass back and waved Tymon on perfunctorily. A faint hiss escaped from the crowd, a collective sigh.
The boy made his way through the area cleared by the soldiers up to the city palisade. The day was turning fine and his tunic clung to him in sticky, smothering folds. Sunlight glanced, blinding, on the dusty boards of the dock and beat down on the bodies pressed together behind the line of militiamen. The soldiers stuck out their chests and swung their short clubs purposefully. Hungry eyes followed Tymon along the quays. Sometimes a voice sang out from the crowd, promising him delights, but it was soon silenced by a gruff word or the crack of a club. The throng shifted, swallowing the perpetrator into oblivion. He tried to keep his gaze evasive and his expression non-committal, but he could not help glancing back curiously at the people behind the military cordon. They were mostly children.
The docks were packed with boys and young men, none of whom were much older than Tymon himself. He was to learn later that they came from the tent-town on the outskirts of the city, refugees who had fled the drought in the outlying reaches of the canopy. The urchins were a ragged, fluid lot, their faces pinched with starvation under a veneer of grime. They were full of the smiling, terrible exuberance of those who have nothing to lose. A few of the younger ones broke away from the back of the crowd and shadowed him to the palisade gates, crying for alms. When he did not respond, they danced about him, yelling, ‘Putar! Putar!’, which he guessed was a local insult. They gave up their chant only at the start of the main thoroughfare into the city, where they dispersed in a hail of shrieks. He was left standing in a crowded street market, gazing up at the tiers of Marak city.
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