The town was even filthier up close than it had appeared from the ship. The houses were made of tawdry lightwood, jammed together and overflowing with refuse. The stink of the gutters in the lowest tier was overpowering, for they opened directly onto the compost cloths below. He had been told to follow the main ramp through the first and second tiers until it reached the entrance to the Governor’s palace; he walked slowly on, gazing about him. The market, where he had expected to see Argosian colonials, was overrun by Nurians: traders, artisans, servants and errand-boys. The only ‘white-necks’ in the vicinity were the omnipresent soldiers. Tymon wondered that his countrymen did not seem to go out in the streets at all. Everything in the town was unfamiliar, pungent, chaotic. He saw no vehicles, for there was no space for anything bigger than a handcart to pass. Several times he caught sight of swaying, curtained boxes held aloft on the shoulders of four men and accompanied by a retinue of guards. He realised after a while that these were covered litters for the transport of paying passengers, probably his fellow Argosians. There were animals forever underfoot, herds of yellow-eyed, lop-eared shillees and diseasedlooking dock birds squabbling at the refuse-holes. His head reeled with new sounds and smells, and he was glad when the market came to an end and the ramp was a little freer.
Through the compost odour receded in the second level of the city, the narrow streets were eclipsed by the looming presence of the Governor’s palace. The higher tiers were given over to the official buildings and colonial residences. Crowds and shops disappeared and the curtained litters multiplied. The few pedestrians stared at Tymon coldly. He peered up in trepidation at the Governor’s oversized mansion. The temple and the mission would be next to it, at the entrance to the third tier. Every step made him feel as if a noose were tightening about his neck. He drifted past the headquarters of the Spice Guild, a dour hardwood fortress surrounded by what seemed to be an overabundance of walls, before arriving at last at the imposing gates to the palace. There he stopped, searching in vain for the temple.
It was several moments before he grasped that he was looking straight at it. To his right, set back from the ramp, stood an eight-sided building. It was locked and appeared singularly deserted, even disused. The decorative shingles on the dome were chipped and the whitewash on the walls had faded to oblivion. He sat down on the front steps and waited, hoping someone would turn up. No one did. Eventually he rose to his feet and crossed to the far side of the building, where a movement in the narrow quadrangle behind the temple caught his attention. An old woman in a shapeless black headscarf was sweeping the back courtyard. Temple cleaners were a familiar sight to Tymon; the black crone was a shrivelled icon so universal that her presence put him at his ease. He hurried forward, calling, ‘In the beauty, Amu! Where is Father Verlain?’
She turned and gazed at him wordlessly. The boy saw with a thrill of surprise that her eyes were almost colourless, as clear as Tree-water. He came to an uncertain halt; she was a Nurian. He had been warned not to speak to the natives. Besides, she might not even understand him. But just as he was about to leave, the answer came in a cracked and weedy whisper.
‘In beauty, nami. Father in mission compound, there.’ She pointed a knobbed and wrinkled finger at the gated archway on the other side of the courtyard. ‘He sleep, you wake. Good?’ She smiled, exposing a line of astonishingly perfect teeth, the tip of her nose almost touching her chin.
‘Oh, I don’t want to bother him if he’s resting,’ protested Tymon. ‘I’ll just wait.’
‘Nah, nah, you go now,’ insisted the crone, suddenly imperious, brandishing her straw broom. ‘Vaz, go, go.’
She rapped him on the back with the handle, pushing him along. He submitted in bewilderment and headed towards the open gate. She mumbled a stream of Nurian after him, nodding vigorously until he lost sight of her.
Beyond the arch he entered another, smaller compound, paved with barkwood tiles and blissfully shaded by a wide sackcloth awning. Under the awning stood a tattered-looking couch, and on the couch lay a fat man in priest’s robes, sound asleep. A grass-weave fan rested on his rotund stomach, trembling slightly with each breath. One bare foot was propped up on the threadbare pillows while the other trailed on the floor, graced by a stained green slipper. The second slipper was nowhere to be seen. Beside the man, within easy reach, stood a large and complicated jar-pipe, quietly bubbling. He was lying turned towards Tymon. The boy saw a flaccid, corpulent face, as blotched and bloated as a drowned spider. He tiptoed closer, fascinated by the priest’s ugliness. He noticed that a pool of spittle had collected in a corner of the sleeper’s mouth and was slowly trickling onto the couch.
Tymon might have continued watching the fat man in a state of hypnotised horror had it not been for a very large, very loud fly that appeared from behind the awning and settled unceremoniously on the priest’s nose. For such a bloated bag of a face, the nose was disproportionately small. It quickly wrinkled under the weight of the fly and with a snort and a splutter, the fat man was awake. He waved his hands about his head, chasing the buzzing offender off with an oath. Then he saw Tymon standing above him and squealed.
The sound was ludicrous. The boy disguised his laughter with some difficulty as a cough, and stepped back. Flustered, the priest gathered himself into a semi-sitting position, his bare toes searching the floor in vain for the missing slipper.
‘Who…who the devil are you, creeping up on me like that? Didn’t anyone tell you it was rude to play jokes on a priest, you damned Nurry?’ He stared blearily at Tymon and paused. ‘You’re no Nurry.’
‘In the beauty, Father. My name is Tymon, and I’m here on my mission service. Sorry to have woken you.’ Tymon looked down, furiously fighting the urge to smile.
‘Ah, the indentured student,’ yawned the priest grumpily. ‘You certainly do know how to make an entrance! I’m Verlain. No need for “beauties”, or “fathers”, or any such like. We’re at the rotten rear end of the world, and there’s no point in standing on ceremony. But you’ll soon learn that…’ He heaved himself up with a resigned grunt and salvaged the remaining green slipper from under the couch.
‘Would you like to see my papers, sir?’ Tymon could not bring himself to do without an honorific altogether. He held out his travel pass to the priest, who waved it away impatiently.
‘None of that, no need. Why bother? They sent you to this hole, that’s good enough for me.’
He lumbered off towards a room opening onto the courtyard and motioned the boy to follow him. Inside, the stale smell of jar-weed hung in the air, as well as another cloying odour Tymon could not identify. The room was sparsely furnished with a crude table, two chairs and a rickety cabinet. The fat priest rummaged in this last item, retrieving a stoppered cask and two small bowls, which he brought to the table. Then he squeezed himself into one of the chairs, wheezing heavily, and indicated that Tymon should join him. He opened the cask and poured a clear, pungent liquid into the bowls.
‘To Argos city!’ he announced, raising his bowl in a toast. ‘And the mean-spirited bastards who live there!’
Tymon stared at his companion in shock. The other shrugged his ample shoulders, gulped down the contents of the bowl in one go and poured himself another.
‘To Argos city,’ he said again. ‘May they rot in their own damn rainfall.’
Down went the priest’s second bowl. A third was poured. Tymon sipped his portion of the acrid liquid in an attempt at courtesy. He was barely able to swallow a mouthful.
‘To Argosh city,’ said the priest, a little more blurrily, ‘love of my life.’
Like a sudden shower of rain, the prayer-call drifted through the open window once more. The sound sent a shiver down Tymon’s spine. The chant was mesmerising. Why couldn’t the temple in Argos have a human voice? he thought. Why was it always bells, bells, bells, fit to tear his eardrums apart? But the music did not come from the direction of the Marak temple, or from anywhere near the deserted, dusty mission buildings. It e
choed out far below, beyond the first tier of the city.
‘You see, my boy, we’re useless here,’ Verlain giggled, leaning towards him conspiratorially. His breath was foul. ‘The Nurries don’t even go to our temple. They prefer the old shrine in the tent-town. Ha, ha! We’re the joke of the day, the laughing-stock of the natives! To Argos!’
He raised his bowl again, drank, and slumped onto the table, snoring.
13
So began Tymon’s colonial service. He soon realised that the fat priest was right: the Marak mission was a resounding failure. The temple remained locked and disused even on seventh nights, and the painted dome and fluted columns of the edifice were sadly dilapidated. No one bothered to visit the mission or enquire after Father Verlain. The city’s Argosian elite, so disparagingly called ‘white-necks’ by the novices at the seminary—a term almost unheard-of in the colony—attended the Governor’s chapel in the third tier, while the natives preferred their own heretical shrine in the refugee quarter. This state of affairs was tacitly condoned by the authorities, more out of a desire to snub the seminary than any spirit of tolerance. For a split had developed between the colonists and their superiors in Argos. The Colonial Board would not waive taxes during the drought, or provide aid in the form of extra water to the outpost. The Governor of Marak had retaliated by threatening to declare his town independent. Argosian trade dirigibles were still permitted into the air-harbour, as were the seminary’s recruitment vessels, ferrying tithe-pilgrims back to Argos. But the mission itself had fallen out of favour.
The circumstances of Tymon’s indenture were unlike anything he could have imagined or predicted. Far from the suffocating restrictiveness of the seminary, he was propelled into a life of unexpected licence. None of the usual clerical laws were in force at the mission. He could smoke jar-weed and eat on fast days, if he wished. There was no longer any question of rising at dawn, no morning ritual to hurry to, no sermons to endure. In fact, there were no sacred activities at the mission at all. When he asked how he should observe daily prayer, Verlain laughed in his face.
‘Pray all you like, my dear boy,’ the priest tittered. ‘But as to ablutions, remember that water is rationed in Marak. You may find that we have a different attitude to such things. One shouldn’t judge a leaf by its colour, eh?’
True to his word, Father Verlain did not use one drop of the mission’s water allowance to bathe and passed his days tippling on the courtyard couch in a cloud of sweat and weed-smoke. He began drinking from his acrid bowl as soon as he emerged from his sleeping quarters around noon, and continued steadily through lunch and the hours that followed until by dinner he was either incoherent or inert. His only contact with the outside world was Amu Bibi, the temple crone. The old woman swept the courtyard in a daily rite of futility and cooked quantities of spiced melata for the mission meals, muttering to herself in a hotchpotch of Nurian and Argosian. Tymon suspected that she was half-witted in any language. She seemed to think she knew a devastating joke at the priest’s expense, for she would wink at Tymon behind his back when he spoke, tapping her long nose with a bony finger. It was some time before the boy’s stomach became accustomed to her indigestible cooking.
Initially, he relished the lack of discipline under Verlain’s tutelage. He had few obligations at the mission. So long as he completed the daily supply run and carried out some secretarial duties for his employer, his time was his own. He would rise gloriously late each morning, grab a mobile breakfast from the mission kitchen and quit the compound, unwashed and tousle-headed, for the madness of the first-tier bazaar. There he would purchase the everlasting beans and bread that made up Amu Bibi’s meals, as well as casks of the harsh kush which Verlain consumed in vast quantities. He did not hurry on these errands, dawdling in the streets for hours before returning to the mission for lunch. He calculated that Samiha must by now have reached the city, barring accident or mishap; he waited in the market and on the air-harbour quays, anxious and full of hope, to catch a glimpse of the familiar red head. He had told himself that his service was only temporary. When he found her again, he would run away from the priests for good. He would join the rebels and fight for Nurian freedom. Everything would change. It was only a matter of time.
Time went by, however, with no news of the red-haired spy. As the first week of his indenture gave way grudgingly to a second, and then a third, his confidence began to flag in the sultry heat of the eastern summer, and the reality of the colony settled on his spirit like dust. Despite his encounter with Samiha, he had not been prepared for the grinding poverty and misery that confronted him in Marak. There was little in the way of a livelihood to be had in the parched outer reaches of the canopy. But there were no jobs waiting for the Nurians in the city, either, no way out of their predicament except to sell their freedom to the tithe-ships. The refugees seethed with anger beneath their mask of servility and their masters reacted as if they were under siege. Well-to-do colonials restricted themselves to fortified compounds and never left without an armed escort. Nurian revolutionary slogans were a common sight scrawled on the walls and doorways of the town, erased by colonial soldiers to the tune of a patriotic song. No love was lost between the two strata of Marak society.
Putar! The epithet—insulting, untranslatable—dogged Tymon’s heels whenever he ventured near the market or docks, or into the tent-town. He would hear the word hissed out on a daily basis in the cramped and stinking alleyways. The Nurian traders dealt abruptly with him, as if they wished to have as little to do with him as possible and only took his money out of necessity. There seemed no hope of approaching the locals in friendship. It was a stark lesson for the boy. His simplistic vision of joining the rebels began to fray at the edges, and he wondered whether even Samiha’s support would be enough to buy him credibility with her friends.
To make matters worse, he learned to his chargrin that the lack of strictures at the mission was double-edged. Verlain’s peculiarities were to prove as disagreeable in their own way as the rigid routine at the seminary. Every day when his errands in the market were done, he was expected to take dictation for his employer, copying out petitions to the Governor and to the seminary bemoaning the state of the mission and asking for funds. The priest would insist that he sit beside him on the tattered courtyard divan to accomplish this task, not on the floor at his feet as was customary for a student—a dubious privilege made particularly gruesome by Verlain’s lack of personal hygiene. The dictation became less intelligible and more unpleasant with each passing hour, as the fat man’s letter writing gave way to his drinking, and his drinking to wallowing despair.
For Father Verlain was a tortured soul. He claimed to have been a victim of political intrigue, cheated out of his rightful position at the seminary and sent off to the colonies as punishment. He hated both his colleagues in Argos for sending him to Marak and the ‘white-necks’ for failing to appreciate him once he was there. He had an almost morbid fear of the Nurian natives, considering them no better than animals and ready to slit his throat at the slightest provocation. His post, he would moan to Tymon, was an emotional exile, a spiritual death. Much to his dismay, the boy found himself becoming his employer’s confidant, a party to tearful reminiscences and sodden confessions. Verlain had cried on his shoulder by the end of his first week at the mission. By the third they were, in the fat man’s florid terms, ‘bosom companions’. One airless afternoon, about a month after his arrival, Tymon was obliged to contend with more than Verlain’s unpleasant smell.
‘My dear, you speak with the sweet voice of an angel, in the accent of my beloved home. Argos city, tall and bright, you hold my captive heart tonight.’
Tymon started up from his copy. The day’s dictation, a report to the seminary, had given way as usual to self-pitying reminiscences on the part of his employer. Fountains of drunken nostalgia accompanied Verlain’s letters, and this time the priest had broken into tuneless doggerel, midphrase. He had also laid his sweaty palm on the boy’s kn
ee and was leaning far too close for comfort. Perspiration stained his armpits and the stench rose like a miasma from his robes. Tymon gritted his teeth.
‘Maybe one day you’ll return home, sir,’ he answered with an effort.
‘Not with those old buzzards sitting on the Council,’ oozed Verlain. ‘You know that! Anyone who’s a little different gets sent off to rot in the service…’
‘Shall I leave this for tomorrow?’ Tymon tried to deflect the priest’s attention to his copy-leaf.
Verlain ignored the question. ‘I suppose they sent you away for a reason too, my angel, hmm?’ he murmured. ‘Remember you can tell me anything, I’ll understand.’ His fat fingers squeezed Tymon’s leg and he bent closer, breathing heavily.
Tymon wavered between hilarity and disgust. The foul-smelling priest was the last person he wished to confide in, or compare himself with. He shifted further away from Verlain on the couch.
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand you very well, sir.’
The fat man sighed petulantly. ‘Well, I suppose we all have our thorny vine to bear,’ he wheezed, releasing the boy’s knee. ‘The colonies can be confusing for a fresh young bud like yourself. I am your friend. If you have any needs…any needs at all…do not hesitate to ask me for help.’
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