Samiha's Song

by Mary Victoria

  ‘Yes, Excellency,’ said Lace, mimicking Wick’s craven tone. ‘The Kion of Nur will be in our custody within a month. Aren’t you happy to witness such events?’

  ‘Why would you do that?’ the acolyte blurted out, in anguish. ‘Why would you run the risk of starting the End Times?’

  The Envoy struggled to a half-seated position on the bed, glaring at him.

  ‘End Times?’ he hissed, transported by a sudden, seething fury. ‘End Times, you fool? Why would you think we had anything to do with such nonsense? We are masters of our own destiny, not bleating slaves of the Sap. If I have taught you one thing it is that there are no End Times, acolyte. Not for us.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ gabbled Wick. ‘I mean, no, sir. No End Times.’

  ‘Make a note of it,’ wheezed Lace. His anger dissipated as abruptly as it had come, and he collapsed back on the bed. ‘Leave me in peace, acolyte. Your wilful ignorance is grating. I only hope the new recruit will show more aptitude for learning. Goodness knows this little club of ours needs fresh brainpower. Return here at the eighth hour.’

  Wick fled through the door of the cabin, his ear hot with shame.

  13

  ‘The Tree of Being is said to have two aspects, one manifest and one hidden. Just like an ordinary plant growing with its upper half in the sun and its roots buried in loam, the Tree hides part of itself. It’s up to us, as Grafters, to figure out the evident and hidden truth of what we See. If we go by surface interpretations we miss half the story.’

  Tymon closed his eyes and remembered. Remembered the silk balloon floating up the sides of the fissure, white and delicate, melting into the mist. The miraculous reparation Nightside had achieved later with a shredded bootlace, a torn-up shirt and a splinter of cane had kept them afloat until the ether ebbed away and the balloon had snagged itself harmlessly in the twig-thickets. But Tymon recalled only the part of the journey before the escape.

  ‘The Tree is everything: not just the things you like and that are like you, or the outcomes you desire. You are made of the same substance as the bark, the stars, the flight of birds. The past and future are bound up in you. Do not think of people and actions as separate.’

  The Oracle’s voice threaded in and out of his consciousness like Nightside’s busy needle, patching up his understanding. And yet even she could not prevent his thoughts from leaking out, Tymon reflected. Laska’s death left a hole that would sink him. It was easy to become caught up and snagged by the past like a balloon among the twigs.

  That afternoon, trudging after Nightside through the dense thickets with the sleeping Lai slung on his back, he had asked himself whether he might have prevented the captain’s action — whether he could have guessed what he would do, even without the Grafting. But the episode had a relentless quality in his memory, the jarring inevitability of a soldier’s march. Laska had chosen his fate of his own accord. He had premeditated it. His sacrifice saved them. That fact alone made the loss doubly hard to bear. It hung over Tymon like a cloud when they made their camp that evening in a shallow cavity between the twigs, weighing on him as he huddled next to the fire Nightside had coaxed to life in a smoothed-out hardwood hollow.

  ‘You cannot truly become a Grafter until you learn to let go of the outcomes you want and are ready to See what the Sap shows you. Until then you’ll only be a sorcerer, imprisoned by your own desires.’

  Tymon opened his eyes to look at his diminutive teacher. It was always something of a jolt to witness what was apparently a child spout such reams of wisdom. She sat on the other side of the fire, staring into its glowing centre. Beside her, the resolutely taciturn Nightside tended the flames.

  The Oracle had awoken rather conveniently from her slumber just as they halted, and partaken of her meal of bark-porridge without comment. But when darkness crept over the thickets and they drew close to the fire, warming their hands against the chill, she had begun to speak. She spoke in a continuous stream, as if to compensate for Nightside’s silences. Tymon allowed her words to flow over him, half-heard, while the smoke stretched up in a thin line to the stars.

  ‘Good and evil are not what you think they are. The Sap accepts only a balance of necessity. The key is that the balance is always changing, growing. When people attempt to freeze the process, forever favouring themselves, then you have evil. To speak of evil as if it were a thing — even that is misleading. Evil is a no-thing, a hunger. Because it lacks its own resources, it steals from others. It strives against the Sap. And for all its striving and its hunger, in the end it is nothing. At most one might say a branch is dead, or rotten, or blighted by illness. There is no evil.’

  Tymon exhaled in annoyance. He would have preferred not to talk, to be allowed to mull over his grief. But he could not ignore the Oracle entirely. Her words pricked him, goaded him into response. Although he had learned to respect her judgment, he could not help disagreeing with her wholeheartedly on this occasion.

  ‘How can you say that?’ he broke out. ‘After what happened to Laska and Dawn and all the others? How can you pretend it doesn’t matter? Evil exists. It’s real. There are things …’ he faltered, recalling the Envoy, ‘things in the world that are pure evil. I’ve Seen them.’

  At this Nightside stirred as if he were about to speak, but subsided again without comment and poked at the fire with a sliver of bark, his expression grim.

  ‘Of course it matters,’ said the Oracle, her eyes wide with surprise. ‘It matters very much. The thing itself may not exist but the effects are real. The evil you’re thinking of, loss personified, is called a shadow. Such creatures are only remnants of what was. Long ago they were not as they are now. The one you witnessed on the Argosian dirigible was once a proud and mighty Being. That proves my point. It’s rather sad, actually.’

  ‘Forgive me if I lack sympathy in this case,’ snapped Tymon.

  He could have asked her more about the Envoy. He wanted to. But another question filled him, suffocated him, so that he could think of nothing else.

  ‘If you’re angry,’ she remarked, ‘you should talk about it. Don’t let it fester.’

  ‘We couldn’t help them,’ he grated. ‘In spite of the Sight. In spite of everything. We couldn’t save a single one of our friends. Why?’

  His pain and rage at the loss of Laska choked him. Furious tears stung his eyes.

  ‘Because, Tymon,’ she answered gently, ‘saving people is not the purpose of the Grafting.’

  ‘Then what is the purpose, Ama?’ he demanded, vehement. ‘I’ve Seen and Seen, all for nothing. Even your warnings to the Saffid didn’t work. If people don’t die in one way they die in another. What’s the point?’

  ‘The purpose of Grafting,’ answered the Oracle, ‘is to align yourself with the Sap. If you do that everything becomes clear. What is avoidable and what is unavoidable. The ones you may “save” as you put it, and the ones you may not. The balance of necessity.’

  ‘The balance always seems to work against us,’ growled Tymon. ‘Why didn’t I See what Laska would do? Why did I only See him in the sacks when he was about to be rescued? It’s not fair!’

  ‘Fair?’ She peered sharply into his face. ‘You wouldn’t survive “fair” if it happened to you. You got exactly what you asked for from the Reading. You asked to See your friend when it was possible to do something for him. That was precisely the vision you received. Later on you would not have been able to help him. “Fair” would have been all four of us smashed to pieces at the bottom of the fissure. Laska’s action changed that outcome. It’s not fair, no, but it allowed us to escape.’

  ‘How can you just accept it?’ he protested. ‘How can you live knowing you’re only here because he isn’t?’

  ‘Well, Tymon, when someone does that for you, it means among other things that you have to go on and you have to live, otherwise the sacrifice is in vain.’

  He could not deny this. He remembered Samiha saying much the same after Oren and Noni’s capture. He glared at
the fire and rubbed his eyes with his fist. There was a pause. Then Nightside did speak.

  ‘Syon,’ he admonished. ‘Be glad for friend.’

  ‘Glad?’ mumbled Tymon, in puzzlement.

  ‘Freehold judge is great soul. He dies well, saving us. He is angel in other life.’

  Tymon could dredge up no adequate response to this. He was baffled by the faith of people like Nightside, who had lost everything but still produced a round of solemn pieties. Even his vision of the dead Focal was of no comfort to him. He did not care if Laska’s consciousness survived somehow beyond the borders of time. He only cared that his friend’s existence had been cut short unjustly, here and now.

  ‘Because of how he die, we have asha,’ continued Nightside.

  ‘I thought you didn’t condone revenge?’ Tymon’s eyes flicked toward the Oracle in query.

  ‘This time it’s more like a sacred duty,’ she replied. ‘Pure-hearted self-sacrifice is one of the highest acts registered by the Sap. Those who benefit from it are held to account. They must give something in return.’

  ‘Oh?’ Tymon recalled Samiha’s obsession with martyrdom; he thought of the mad pilgrims, throwing themselves into the Mouth. ‘What do we give?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Different for each,’ smiled Nightside. ‘You know when time come.’

  Trudging through the pathless thickets in the pouring rain the next day, Tymon reflected that the Argosian priests’ system of cosmic comeuppance and the Nurians’ talk of duty and asha were far too alike for comfort. The Oracle continued to dispense her wisdom to him all morning, ensconced in the sling he had constructed the day before out of ropes and sacking salvaged from the balloon. She spoke to him about the philosophy of Grafting, about the necessity of giving up one’s own desires in favour of what should be, while he toiled along in mutinous silence and Nightside scouted out the path ahead. The nineteen Leaf-Letters and their permutations, the Oracle claimed, were no more or less than the will of the Sap writ large upon all creation. Some practitioners of the art, namely sorcerers, made the mistake of thinking that the Sap was a power source without will or intent of its own. She assured him this was not the case. Sorcerers meddled with forces beyond their control. A Grafter knew those forces were meddling with him.

  Tymon wished fervently that she would talk about something else. He was keen enough to know about the practical side of Grafting, to learn to harness his abilities, launch the trance and find the all-important Leaf-Letters on his own. He wished to be able to do a Sending or a Seeming at will. All his experiences of the Sight had so far been involuntary or guided, and he knew he had experienced no more than an infinitesimal part of the Tree of Being. He had hardly been able to See his own ‘growth', let alone interpret it. But the Oracle never touched on such subjects and seemed more intent on giving him a moral lecture. To use the Grafting as a tool to promote one’s own interests was a grave error, she insisted. Those who did so could only See aspects of the future involving personal gain. Without communication with the Sap, the Tree of Being became a pathless maze, a trap for unwary souls. Tymon plodded on for hours through the dripping rain to the sound of her sermonising.

  To make matters worse, he suspected they were lost themselves in the branches of the ordinary World Tree. Despite Nightside’s best efforts, they reached an impasse several times that morning, faced with a gap between the clumps of twigs too wide to negotiate. The Saffid youth maintained that they would soon cross the Marak-Donyah road, a highway leading north to south through the canopy and passing within a day’s march of Cherk Harbour. From there, he said, they would be able to reach habitable parts, and eventually arrive in Sheb.

  But by mid-afternoon Tymon guessed they had travelled little more than ten miles from their campsite, and mostly in circles. His back ached from carrying the Oracle, who slept and woke sporadically, resuming her lecturing as soon as her eyes opened, as if she had never stopped. He had decided to carry her even while she was awake, for fear Lai would fall and break her neck during one of these abrupt departures. Once more he was obliged to ask himself whether the Oracle’s treatment of her host was entirely just. The child’s pale skin had acquired a sickly tint on the journey. He tried to keep her as dry as possible while she slept, wrapping his cloak about her, but after a few hours the rain penetrated every single layer of clothing. This, however, did not discourage his teacher from her attempts at educating him, however.

  ‘Repeat the first lesson,’ she piped through lips blue with cold, as he stumbled on in the fading afternoon light. ‘I want to make sure you’ve grasped the basics. We know something about the Tree of Being. Now define the Sap.’

  ‘The Sap is not “what”,’ Tymon answered automatically. He still treated the Oracle’s lessons as he had the priests’ teaching, as a product to be swallowed whole and regurgitated when necessary. ‘The Sap is “why”.’

  ‘What does that actually mean?’

  She had not told him what it meant. She had departed from his memorised text, forcing him to think. ‘Does it mean the Sap is a reason, not a thing?’ he hazarded.

  ‘Very good. It’s the reason we exist. It gives us life.’

  ‘Yes, Ama.’

  ‘You don’t sound particularly happy about it.’

  ‘It’s just that it seems to take more than it gives, at the moment,’ he mumbled, then stubbed his toes on a section of rough growth and winced.

  ‘Bear in mind that your observations may not be complete,’ she said. ‘So, if the Sap gives us life, then why do we See? Is it not enough that we simply live?’

  ‘I guess … I guess we need to See, in order to be at one with the Sap and make things as they should be.’ He sighed, unconvinced of this truth.

  ‘How do we know that we’re at one with the Sap?’

  ‘We find!’

  Nightside’s voice called out excitedly from the thickets ahead, mercifully interrupting the Oracle’s questions. Tymon glanced up in relief to see the Saffid youth hurrying through the mist toward them, his face beaming.

  ‘Marak road,’ he added, by way of specification, as he drew level with Tymon. ‘I see from high place. We on wrong branch, must go around.’ He waved his arm northwards. ‘Two more miles, maybe.’

  They continued to walk for what seemed another age, bathed in the freezing wet cloud that had descended over the canopy. Nightside led them out of the twig-stand and down the steep crest of the branch with the aim of reaching the point where it joined its neighbour beneath. Tymon shivered in his soaked clothes and skidded on the bark, very glad the Oracle had chosen to remain silent as he picked his way down the slope. After a while he craned over his shoulder to see that she had simply fallen asleep again. They wandered on, descending ever further into the canopy. Rolling cloud obscured the space beyond the branch, and they had to blunder forward in ignorance, trusting to Nightside’s momentary vision through the thickets. At last they glimpsed the trench-like crux of their limb and the rising slope of the one they hoped would bring them to the Marak road. Breathless, they toiled up yet another slope, scrambled into yet another stand of twigs and finally burst through the dense fog onto a line of planks placed end to end, threading its way through the thickets.

  ‘That’s a blessing,’ puffed Tymon. ‘I could go on a ways before we stop, Nightside, if you’re willing. Even you won’t get a fire going tonight. We’d best keep moving in the cold.’

  He began to walk northwards along the planks.

  ‘I not go that way,’ Nightside called out from behind him.

  ‘What?’ Tymon halted in shock. ‘But … the Freehold lies to the north …’

  ‘You go to Freehold, Syon. Take Oracle, protect her. I go south, find my family. This my asha.’ The other youth appeared to have reached a point of equilibrium in his own mind. His expression was calm and determined, his eyes bright.

  ‘But don’t you want help?’ objected Tymon. ‘Once the judges hear your story they’re sure to let you use one of the new air-chariots
to go after your family, at the very least. There was another almost completed in the workshop before we left — and you haven’t seen how they work, Nightside, they’re three times faster than an ordinary dirigible. It’ll cut weeks off your journey. Besides, you don’t have any food …’

  ‘Not to worry, I get food from canopy, I am Saffid. I think judges need all dirigibles, fast or not fast. They not help me.’

  Tymon blinked at him through the unrelenting rain, baffled. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ said Nightside, slowly, ‘because of Reaper, Syon. Do not be angry. I not say before, because worry does no good.’

  ‘What didn’t you say?’ asked Tymon, with a lurch of misgiving.

  The Saffid youth looked away. ‘Some say Reaper is demon,’ he muttered. ‘They hear demon voice on ship, some nights. Howling, and screaming. Not right.’

  ‘What didn’t you say, Nightside?’ insisted Tymon, his voice rising with anxiety. ‘Is the Freehold in danger?’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed the other. ‘Pirate fleet go north. This I hear in market, in Cherk Harbour, when I look for my people.’

  ‘When? When will they get there?’ cried Tymon. ‘If you heard it three days ago … that would mean they’ve arrived, wouldn’t it?’

  Nightside gazed at him sadly. Tymon’s voice trailed off as the truth sank in. He had missed his opportunity to find out about Samiha during the Oracle’s first Reading. And now it was too late.

  ‘I sorry,’ murmured his companion. ‘Maybe you find no more Freehold when you arrive. Maybe you lose everything, like Nightside. I hope not. Sav vay, Lord. I know we meet again.’

  With that, he bowed low to Tymon and turned on his heel, striding south along the planks. Tymon stared after him a long moment in consternation. Only the discomfort of the chill air caused him to stir at last, and set off in the opposite direction with a heavy heart.

  That evening the sun did not set but was gradually erased by a blanket of cloud. When the thickets were completely plunged in murk, Tymon halted his march and found all he could in the way of shelter in the failing light. In a shallow cutting between the twigs on the right-hand side of the path, he managed to construct a lean-to of loose bark, using the side of the cutting as a wall and laying the shards against it to create a roof. His supper was another packet of bark-flour, mixed with the readily available rainwater. He had only ten folded strawpaper envelopes of the tasteless powder left. He crawled under his improvised shack with the sleeping child bundled up beside him, and shivered through a night of bitter cold and regret.