Samiha's Song

by Mary Victoria

  Tymon, nagged the voice in his head. Tymon, Tymon. Ty. Mon. As if it wanted to wear the meaning of the name out.

  He was transported out of the city at noon, rattling out of the gates in one of the ubiquitous caged carts, sliced through by the bitter winter breeze. All he knew was that he was bound for an unnamed vine plantation to the south. The two jail guards charged with his transport had been wholly uncommunicative about his final destination, and nobody from the seminary had visited or contacted him since he had signed the captain’s provisional document. He had simply been handed down his sentence from afar: life imprisonment and hard labour, as decreed by the Lawgiver himself. No one seemed interested in hearing a full confession of his activities. He was glad. He doubted he would have come up with a sufficiently believable tale about his involvement with the Lantrians. What would have happened to Bolas and Masha then, if he had failed them at the last?

  The prison cart turned to the left beyond the gate, rolling on toward the main road at the far end of the air-harbour. Tymon shuddered with cold and pulled the soldiers’ coarse blanket about his shoulders once more. He had been issued with two, one for himself and one for his companion, for this time he was not travelling alone in the cart. Verlain lay inert on the shaking floor in a pool of his own vomit. He had already soiled his covering. It seemed that Tymon would be pursued yet again by the priest’s stink, like a curse.

  His former employer had been handed a sentence similar to his own, though he was evidently unaware of it and had remained largely unconscious since he was heaved into the cart, unable to lift his face from the floor. Tymon had tried several times, unsuccessfully, to prop him up against a corner and secure the edges of the blanket around him against the cold. But his right arm was still sore and weak from the fight with Wick, and he had been obliged at last to let the priest lie, face-down in the vomit. He suspected that Verlain had been sent away to die on the plantation, for no one could believe such a decayed creature capable of hard labour. He pressed his own face against the juddering bars of the cage to escape the priest’s smell and watched the docks roll by.

  Piles of grey slush lay on the boardwalk, all that remained of the snowstorm the day before, though the clouds above the West Chasm looked set to hurl a fresh load at the city. The dock where Samiha had been sent to her death had returned to its normal state; the small trading vessels were back, moored there as if the event had never occurred. Tymon fixed his gaze on the eastern quays. The Jay vessels had been stripped of their stages and strings of coloured lanterns in preparation for departure. The players were to be seen on their ships, dismantling props in the sharp wind and packing away the gaudy tents, for the Impure entertainers were required to leave Argos city after the festival or pay a fine. By evening there would be no more colour in the air-harbour, no joy left on the drab, dirty quays.

  His eyes anxiously sought out and identified the barge with the striped pavilion near the end of the line. The tent had been emptied of its bleachers, which lay piled up and fastened together in neat rows at the aft of the vessel. A young woman in work breeches stood on the summit of one of the stacks, tying down the load.

  ‘Jocaste!’ he called out to her, his heart skipping a beat.

  He rose unsteadily to his feet and glanced toward the front of the vehicle: the soldiers in the driver’s seat paid him no heed. The pair of herd-beasts yoked to the cart trudged on, flicking their short tails.

  ‘Jocaste!’ he cried again, hoarsely.

  She heard him the second time, picked up on his voice through the din of the air-harbour and across the expanse of the quays with uncanny sensitivity. She leapt nimbly off the stack and vaulted over the dirigible’s deck-rail, catching up with the slow-moving vehicle without any trouble. Her gentle brown face was full of concern as she jogged alongside him on the quay.

  ‘I heard you were being sent away,’ she said. ‘Tymon, I’m so sorry. We’ve been useless to you. We were confined to our vessels until this morning: they even sent soldiers to search the ships, as if we were smugglers.’

  ‘Did Nell come? Did she tell you about the delivery?’ he breathed over the clattering wheels.

  She too lowered her voice. ‘Your friend came, never fear. We have the papers. But I’m afraid we haven’t seen Pallas. We’ve looked everywhere.’

  Tymon felt a keen stab of disappointment. ‘Well, maybe he’ll turn up before you go,’ he mumbled. ‘Please keep looking.’

  ‘We’re leaving this afternoon. We can’t wait any longer.’

  He nodded heavily. She drew closer to the cart, whispering between the bars. ‘The papers. That’s what the soldiers were looking for, wasn’t it? We only found them after they left, and we could start dismantling the stage.’

  Tymon glanced once more in a nervous reflex at the driver’s seat. He knelt down so as to be as close to Jocaste as possible.

  ‘Take them far away,’ he hissed. ‘Keep them safe. Maybe one day you’ll be able to give them back to me. Or to Pallas. They’re important: more important than any of us.’

  ‘Is it really her work?’ asked Jocaste, wonderingly. ‘I can’t read it, but Anise said it’s written by the heretic. Is it true what happened at the execution? Did she set a priest on fire with her words? After the All-Father’s proclamation today, we thought it might have been a warning—’

  She was interrupted by the dreaded call ringing out from the front of the cart.

  ‘Hoi! Scram, you Jay rat!’ The driver’s whip curled out, stinging Jocaste’s fingers and causing her to jerk away from the bars.

  ‘Want to come along, ugly?’ jeered the soldier, leaning around the side of the cart to glare at her. ‘There’s room enough in back!’

  Tymon nodded hastily to the scarred girl and waved her away with a cautionary gesture. He stayed close to the bars, watching her figure recede on the quays. After a while, he raised his left hand in farewell. She did the same, remaining so until the vehicle reached the extremity of the air-harbour and turned onto the ramp that zigzagged up the trunk. The sudden gradient caused the herd-beasts to stumble and low pitifully. The soldiers cursed, cracking their long whips through the air, and the cart rolled laboriously forward. Jocaste was lost to view.

  Tymon leaned against the rear of the cage. He had realised after the event that his last gesture to the Jay girl might have been construed as agreement with her story. How quickly the myths had multiplied about Samiha’s death, he mused. He did not know which of the Dean’s declarations Jocaste had been referring to, but it was clear that rumour was rife about the Kion. He had not imagined the people of Argos would see the heretic’s execution as anything other than a triumph for the seminary. And yet, after screaming insults at her and clamouring for her demise, they now seemed ready to credit her with supernatural powers. She had been right about that, he thought, a little sullenly. They would listen to her only when she was dead.

  Tymon, murmured the voice in his head. This time it sounded like an admonition. The voice had left him alone in the hours after Masha’s visit. He ignored it now, hoping it would go away again. And for a while, as they creaked up the main road it did. They passed the brief glimpse of the Divine Mouth behind its outcrop, and after that the intersection to Galliano’s old workshop. Tymon stayed huddled under his blanket and kept his gaze trained on the floor of the cart. His ankle was better now but the skin on his arm still burned. The hand that had been caught in the world-door had turned a dull red. He tried to ease the pain by allowing the cool wind to pass over it, to no avail. At last he simply cradled it in his other palm, resting against the shuddering bars of the cage. Soon they were deep inside the leaf-forests above the city, travelling southwards on a level ledge that cut like a straight gash across the trunk. A seemingly endless wall of bark stretched on Tymon’s left. To his right plunged the West Chasm, rolling with chill fog.

  Around mid-afternoon the soldiers halted to relieve themselves. They did not offer Tymon the opportunity to do the same. As the two guards stood exchan
ging coarse jokes by the trunk wall, Verlain stirred, raising himself up to stare blankly about. Then he doubled over and regurgitated a stream of blood. Tymon scrambled to his feet in alarm.

  ‘Guards!’ he cried. ‘This man is ill!’

  He squatted by Verlain and tried to hoist him up, holding the priest with difficulty out of his own effluence. One of the soldiers strolled toward them unconcernedly.

  ‘So?’ he drawled, buttoning up his breeches.

  ‘Can’t you at least spare him some water?’

  There were no provisions of any kind in the cage, apart from the blankets. Tymon’s own stomach growled with hunger, for he had had no more than a few hunks of dry bread thrown at him over the past two days. His lips were cracked from thirst despite the cold. But the soldier, a thick-necked, smirking fellow, simply gave him a long and insolent stare as he stood before the cage.

  ‘Waste supplies on traitors?’ he sneered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Please,’ begged Tymon. ‘He’s going to die if you don’t.’ Verlain’s head rolled limply and the whites of his eyes showed under the half-closed lids.

  ‘Fine by me.’ The soldier bared his teeth in a vicious grin. ‘Call it a casualty of war. First of many.’

  ‘What war?’ exclaimed Tymon, his anger mounting through his distress. ‘He’s just one sick person—’

  ‘What war, he asks,’ hooted the man, turning to his companion in disbelief. ‘What war. Like he don’t know.’

  The sound of the soldiers’ laughter jarred unpleasantly. The thick-necked man turned back to Tymon, leering. ‘Only the war your Lantrian friends had coming,’ he mocked. ‘Only the war you came to spy about and report on to your southy masters. Stinking southy spy. You’d betray your own mother.’

  Abruptly furious, he spat through the bars at Tymon. ‘They’ll get their war, thanks to you,’ he hissed. ‘I was on the air-harbour to see the speechifying this morning. The Saint’s going to make them womanish southy Lords bend down and take what’s coming. Then he’ll make the rest of ‘em, damn Nurries and ungrateful white-necks, pay Argos its proper due. That’s right! No more hand-outs, you sons of whores.’ He laughed again, a harsh, braying bark, and returned to the front of the cart.

  Tymon knelt at the base of the cart, the bizarre echo of the colonial soldier’s phrase heard long ago in Marak ringing in his ears. So this was the proclamation Jocaste had mentioned earlier. The Dean had officially declared war on his neighbours to the south. The vehicle lurched forward with another whip-crack. He caught Verlain as the priest rolled out of his arms, and dragged him awkwardly to one side, away from the pool of blood. The man shivered and moaned; Tymon spread his own blanket over him as well, unable to think of what else to do. Then he crouched on the swaying floor, staring through the bars of the cage as he tried to comprehend what the soldier had just told him. Thanks to him, the man had said. There would be a war with Lantria thanks to him. Thanks to Tymon. Tymon.

  ‘It would have happened anyway,’ remarked the disembodied voice in his ears.

  ‘They used my confession,’ he breathed aloud, responding to it for the first time. ‘The Dean and his cronies. They set it up to look like I was a spy to justify their own plans.’

  ‘That’s what tends to happen in these cases, yes.’

  ‘One more reason, I suppose, why I should never have gone back to Argos,’ he sighed, rubbing his good hand across his face.

  ‘He would have found another way to do it, even so,’ the voice reassured him. ‘Lantrians stealing the secret of blast-poison and giving it to rebels in the Eastern Canopy, or some such. Lantrian-sponsored pirate raids on Argosian holdings. There’s no end of convenient excuses.’

  ‘But why look for an excuse? It’s not like he cares if Lantrians are slavers, or anything. Why would he want to start a war?’

  ‘Pride.’ The voice gave a dismissive grunt. ‘Ambition. Delusion. Who knows? He listens to shadows.’

  His own delusion appeared confident enough of being heard, thought Tymon. It held forth with all the authority of a real person. Now that he had allowed the voice to speak to him, encouraged it as it were, it had lost its twittering insistence and acquired an oddly familiar tone. He recognised that dry, sardonic humour. He had heard it before.

  ‘Who are you?’ he muttered. A shiver passed through him, a teetering hope.

  ‘Don’t you recognise me yet? Granted, it took you a while to begin to listen. I was getting quite tired of calling.’

  ‘Oracle?’ he whispered, hardly daring to believe it.

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘But how?’ He shook his head, mumbling to himself in the jolting cart. ‘I thought I could only speak to you through a host. I’m not even in the trance! Shouldn’t you be controlling me completely, if this is an Exchange?’

  ‘If it were a full Exchange, yes. But occasionally I find other means. A temporary visit, a partial solution. There is no need for the trance in this case. Part of your mind has allowed me in. So here I am.’

  ‘Does that mean I’m a madman, a saint, or a fool?’ he enquired with some trepidation.

  ‘A bit of all three, I expect,’ answered the Oracle, laughing gently. ‘I call it being “open”. Your barriers have come down just a little, that’s all.’

  ‘Are you going to stay here, in my mind?’ he asked. He was half-startled by the loudness of his own voice as the wheels of the cart crunched over the bark track.

  He knew she was smiling: he could almost feel it, a warmth inside him. ‘For a while,’ she answered. ‘Don’t worry. I won’t wear out my welcome.’

  He sat in silence, digesting this information. Yes, he was still inhabiting his body. No, he was not in any other strange dimension, like the Veil. And yes, there was no one else inside the cage with him except for Verlain’s flaccid form lolling nearby, shaking with each bump of the road. But he was not alone. The leaf-forests were dark massed shapes in the foggy Chasm. The snow began to fall again, white flecks on the grey bark, just like the flakes settling on Samiha’s thin form on the dock.

  ‘The Kion wore grey to the execution,’ he murmured, thinking aloud. ‘I Saw it as white in the Reading. What does that mean?’

  ‘Grey?’ asked the Oracle quickly. ‘That was not predicted.’ She paused an instant before continuing, ‘A small change, but an interesting one. We’ve taken a course slightly different from the original prophecy. I suspect your involvement in the affair has changed it. In my opinion that’s a good thing. But then, I’m only an Oracle and not omniscient. We won’t know the full ramifications until later. One fact seems certain: some of what was Written has been changed. We’ll have to learn to Read it again in a different way.’

  Tymon was relieved she did not claim omniscience. Jedda must have been wrong about the Oracle being a Born, just as she had been wrong about Samiha, he thought. He did not like the idea of an all-powerful Being occupying his mind, even on the sidelines.

  ‘I’m glad you’re here, Ama,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know what to do when Samiha died. It hurt so much. I had no one.’

  ‘I told you, your pain is your strength,’ she reminded him. ‘And I’m here to help. We go on this next part of the journey together. There will be winter before spring, goodbyes before the reunion. But the new beginning will come. You’re on your way to becoming a full-fledged Grafter now, you know. That means you’ve begun to truly See the Tree of Being for what it is. You know it from the inside out. You know the dark and the light, the pain and joy, the buried roots and the sunlit leaves. Samiha’s passing was a boon to you, though it may not seem so yet. You’re no longer afraid of Loss. That’s a great gain.’

  ‘I have nothing left to lose,’ he pointed out wryly.

  He could not help smiling as the cart rattled on through the softly falling snow. Were the guards to hear him speaking to himself — to the Oracle — they would surely think him mad. But his mirth faded at his next thought. It was a grim one, hard to articulate.

  ‘What about Pallas?�
� he asked, frowning. ‘What about the young Focals? Will I see them again?’

  ‘Most definitely,’ she assured him. ‘What is broken shall be mended. This is the beginning of the Year of Fire. Everything changes: everything returns in a fresh form. You’re no longer going to be alone, Tymon. There will be a gathering of allies both old and new. That foolish man in Argos city is not the only one declaring a war. There’s another battle brewing, one that will take place as much in the world of the Sap as this material one. We move toward the final confrontation.’

  ‘And Jedda?’ he pressed. ‘And Lace? What of them?’

  ‘Ah, Jedda.’ There was a definite note of regret in the Oracle’s voice. ‘She has her own road to travel. I daresay you’ll meet again, though the circumstances of your meeting could vary greatly depending on her choices. I think you’ve guessed already that we haven’t seen the last of our shadow Envoy. We’re all bound together, even him. The Kion’s death has unleashed forces that will shake the very roots of the world. The Grafters aren’t going to just sit back and let their enemies wreak havoc.’

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it,’ he answered, fervent. ‘I want to help in any way I can, Ama. For Samiha’s sake.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. There was a distinct note of pride in her voice. ‘I knew you’d come through. It won’t be easy, but you’re ready.’

  About the Author

  Mary Victoria was born in 1973 in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts in the United States. Despite this she managed to live most of her life in other places, including Cyprus, Canada, Sierra Leone, France and the UK. She studied animation and worked for ten years in the film industry before turning to full-time writing. She now lives in Wellington, New Zealand with her husband and daughter.