Tytiana

by Marc Secchia

  “I’m alright, Sari. Don’t worry,” she said automatically.

  A cool cloth wiped her face. It should have spat and steamed at the insatiable rage boiling inside her gut now. He was no prankster planting a pretty egg. He was a cunning assassin!

  “I’ll … squeeze that louse’s eyeballs … for juice …”

  Tytiana heard her voice echoing down a long, dark tunnel. Then a pure white radiance crept in like a suns-rise to gently suffuse her soul, and she drifted into a place filled with sweet flame that ached as sweetly as her yearning for her mother’s touch, and there was an impression of rocking upon tender fires that seemed to stretch from Helyon to eternity.

  Chapter 3: Vile Assassin

  JAKANI STOOD ATOP the watchtower above the mists that hid Helyon Island like a fine-feathered grey skullcap, his face soaking in the warmth and radiance of the suns-rise. He ached in every bone of his body, yet the guilt-ridden darkness of his soul was by far the deeper affliction.

  His father hated him. No, not hate. Disappointment, expressed so severely, it burned like mordant lashes of acid. ‘What did I do to deserve a worthless son like you?’ The memory hammered through his mind. ‘You celebrate when Mistress Hinzuki and her two children lie dead in the ashes of their home?’ ‘But father, I …’ Was it so wrong to feel weak-kneed relief that their home and the lives of his family, humble as they were, had been spared a feral Dragon’s lava fireball? Crowing, ‘Yes! You’re all alive! Yeeeesss!’ as he capered outside their house in full view of the grieving neighbours … that was wrong. Unforgivable. No one could hate him more than he himself for that reaction.

  Despite his abject apologies, kneeling with his face pressed to the ashes and his arms outspread, they had kicked him out of the funeral procession.

  He wished he could die.

  The whole community had averted their faces from him.

  They spat where he walked.

  Why should it matter so greatly what they thought? Only that to the lamko, originally imported under the very worst conditions by slaver-Dragonships chartered by the Emperor of Kaolili – to rid their kingdom of the disgrace of surplus or undesirable people, it was whispered – community was life. They had stood together in everything, against the worst injustices and the harshest treatment, and endured. Their unity and indeed, uniformity, had formed the backbone of their survival.

  Now he was an outcast from the outcasts. Who knew for how long?

  He had discovered this watchtower’s secret several years before. On the misty mornings of this season, when the subtly rolling hills and vales of Helyon were obscured as if a great mystery awaited their unveiling, this tower allowed one to stand a mere few feet above the vapours, like a swimmer wading through a waist-deep pool. Everything below him was pink and orange mists. Yet when he looked out there, as far as his gaze could reach and farther still with the eyes of his spirit, it seemed to him that he could gaze out over the whole Island-World. It was bleak, majestic, endless. It was a raw song of wonder that choked up his soul.

  Despite his lack of education, for no lamko would ever sully the threshold of a school building with his offensive ignorance, Jakani had once stumbled across an abandoned Geography textbook. Inside was a circular map of his world, which he could not read. Frustrated into action, from that book and with the aid of weeks of eavesdropping outside the school windows, he had grasped the rudiments of reading. Then a gang of Fenturi Nurturers of the First Class – boys who attended the school – caught him peeking in through their window and taught him a lesson. He still bore burn scars on his left buttock as a reminder of his wrongdoing.

  He had memorised the map. It fascinated him. How could the whole world be these tiny Islands just poking their heads above the toxic, depthless Cloudlands like brave shoots struggling to break the soil for the first time? What was down there under the clouds? The Cloudlands did not even act like ordinary clouds. Instead, they rippled from the shore of his low Island to the ends of the world, not blowing about on the winds, but in contrast acting as if they were static, gloopy and immovable. About two miles from where he stood, beyond the grey shroud that encompassed and entirely concealed Helyon from his sight, the Cloudlands stretched out to the horizon like a serene golden carpet, unruffled and unchanging. He knew that there were other Islands like his that surmounted the toxic clouds, and smaller Dragon-roost Islands dotted about that immense expanse, but they were few and the distances between them, enormous. Only Dragonships or Dragons flew that far.

  To the North, the major Islands were Pla’arna, Gemalka, Herliss and Immadia with its fabled mountains and snowfields; to the South, the Fingers of Ferial, enormous Yorbik with its boundless forests, and then places that for him existed only in imagination and fable – powerful and barbaric Sylakia, which had once ruled the Island-World, Remoy, Archion, Jeradia of the giants, and Fra’anior Cluster, ancestral home of the majestic, magical Dragons.

  The selfsame beasts who had majestically immolated Mistress Hinzuki’s hut with great precision. So much for the nobility of Dragons! One childhood belief, punctured like a sad old waterskin.

  The fireball had passed over his own home, fifty feet lower down the hill, without singeing so much as a grass blade upon its rush-thatched roof, blown through the neighbour’s front door, and torched the dwelling within seconds. All that had remained when he arrived was a black smudge and ashes. Even the stone chimney and fireplace had been melted to slag by the terrible heat. Of the Mistress and her twin babes, not a hair could be found.

  It was so wrong. Why pick on the poorest of the poor?

  Their village comprised sixteen huts clustered on a hillside, now reduced to fifteen, each flanked by small vegetable gardens and backed by the tall, broad-leafed enseth trees that were their insurance against deprivation. The root of each enseth tree could be ten feet long and as thick as a man’s torso. Tasty, too. But the parsimonious villagers saved them for special occasions, or the hungry times between harvests, for the High Master of the House to whom this land belonged was not known to be generous with food portions for the workers. Being lamko, their caste survived upon the scraps and leftovers of everyone else’s portions, and whatever they could grow for themselves in their small plots of land.

  Jakani was no stranger to hunger. He was lean in a way that Choice Tytiana would never – no, she was wiry too, he supposed. All whipcord muscle; almost too muscly for a girl. Jakani was proud of his own frame, trained and hardened and as gritty as old sinew twice chewed over, but for a girl, she was not in bad shape.

  Up there on the watchtower, he grimaced at his thoughts. “Sexist idiot. Stuff a cork in it.”

  The morning was far too beautiful to be thinking of Choice Tytiana of the volcanic temper and even more volcanic looks, but to his annoyance, the early golden-orange light streaming over the Cloudlands as the twin suns broke free from their rest upon the horizon reminded him of nothing more forcibly than her astonishing cascade of hair, while the violet colours of the retreating night were like the enigmatic shadows of her eyes, and … why didn’t she wear the traditional headscarf? Odd.

  Still, mooning about over his enchanting new boss was not going to walk him the five miles to his workplace.

  One more look. To the East, the Yellow Moon was three-quarters sunk in the Cloudlands, leaving only the top of its broad, pockmarked sallow bulk to protrude. It was immense, a world in its own right, he supposed. Maybe some weird creatures lived up there? To the South, crescent Jade stood high and proud, while the White Moon was a pinpoint right out over the north-western quadrant, where he understood Immadia to lie. The mists over Helyon, a feature of its unique climate produced by a combination of low altitude, plentiful rainfall from the upper clouds and abundant fenturi trees, were beginning to shift. Soon, the perfect mist-cap would be broken by other watchtowers dotted about the estate, marking and betraying the villages where other serfs and higher-class workers lived, and then the backs of the rolling green hills would heave free of the greyn
ess like leviathans sporting in a lake, and Helyon would bake beneath the suns for another dry season day.

  By then, he should be at the arboretum.

  Turning, Jakani slipped down through a hole in the circular watchtower platform and descended the ladder with the ease of an acrobat. Before his head had passed through the hole, the mists had already closed in.

  He dropped into a world of grey. The broad enseth leaves became dark towers. The hillside with its burgundy volcanic soil became a fey shadow looming behind him as he turned to the path that led out of his village. The tall emerald grasses whispered against his thighs as he slipped by, painting tiny ribbons of dew upon his trousers. He sped up despite the pounding pain in his right foot, deeply pierced by the glass he had kicked aside now two days before. He had wrapped the wound rudely and left it; now he regretted every step. Passing the small tan mohili wheat rectangles on their neatly terraced fields to his right hand, he paralleled a small brook down to the pond at the bottom of the hill where all the children were taught to swim, and just occasionally, the fattest trout in Helyon might be found – that was the legend, at least. Like every other boy in the village, he had tried his luck with a fishing pole for more hours than some might have considered sane. His best catch had been an old soldier’s boot.

  Now he ran at a steady pace along the valley bottom, letting the dawn’s coolness wash over him in cleansing waves as he passed mile upon mile of fenturi plantations. The distinctive burgundy-leafed fruit trees with their clusters of unripe silver fruit were kept pruned low enough that the web pickers could move among them, carefully unravelling web after web onto their bobbins. The grey spiders did not seem to mind the harvesting. They were fruitarian after all, and the slapdash webs seemed to serve no other purpose than to make the great silk Houses of Helyon that much richer, for the finest and indeed the only silk in the Island-World came from Helyon. The spiders would not survive or spin elsewhere.

  From monopoly came money.

  From monopoly came enslavement, another voice in his mind intruded. Enslavement endorsed and indeed, encouraged, by Houses such as those to which Choice Tytiana belonged. Her heritage was built upon the labour of landless serfs like his own family. And she claimed to want to understand something about their lives? His lip curled. Puerile nonsense. Some kind of high-born desire to amuse herself poking about in the smelly, unsavoury lives of the peasants? ‘Oh, look at how dirty their children are! How squalid their huts. How can anyone stand to live such a pathetic life?’

  Gape, goggle, giggle. He despised high-borns with all their airs of arrogance and entitlement!

  Jakani hurled himself over the river bridge at the start of the two-mile incline up to the manor house, or mansion, that belonged to the Master, his family, and their many relatives and functionaries. All were involved in some way in the silk trade. After all, what else was there to do in Helyon?

  A scrap of blue hanging limply from a jangis-berry bush caught his eye, however. Odd. That was the signature colour of House Andamyria, mortal enemy of House Cyraxana, or the crimson house. The blue was also Helyon’s most famous colour. One rumour was that High Master Juzzakarr had executed someone on the spot for daring to wear a dash of blue in their uniform. Probably just a rumour, but the point was well made. No-one wore blue on these lands. Even the blue flowers that bordered some of the rockier parts of the track were weeded out and burned on a regular basis.

  Blue birds were probably in mortal danger, like that turquoise-crested parakeet chirruping amongst the branches of a nearby tree as it chased a few slow-moving beetles. Breakfast. And there went a yellow-throated flycatcher, trilling its high-pitched call – tirr-irr-triii! Its azure wings were a pervasive feature of the orchards. They hunted parasites that would otherwise spoil the crop, and so great pains were taken to protect and provide nests, and keep windrocs, hawks and other predatory birds at bay. Concessions? The High Master must grit his teeth daily!

  After a minute, however, Jakani found the source of that blue cloth – a blue-clad messenger who sped along the path ahead of him. The runner wore the long pantaloons and tunic top of his house, but his feet were bare for running. The path here was a narrow track carved between the orchards, sometimes hugging the dry stonewall boundaries of the old plantations and sometimes winding between the trees, for no lamko or even a higher-caste messenger would be allowed to run on the main paved roads that connected the major Houses. He had to slow up. For a couple of minutes he chased the fellow, and then grew impatient.

  “Hey slow-slug, let me past, will you?”

  The messenger glanced over his shoulder. Jakani could read his thoughts right off the young man’s face. He was a professional runner. No-one was faster than he, and most especially not some grubby lamko waif in his patched-up rags! The fellow accelerated. Jakani kept pace rather more easily than he could credit. They were climbing relentlessly, and his usual stitch had not worked its way beneath his ribs as yet. Instead, he felt expansive. Light. Breezy.

  The messenger clutched his shoulder pouch and lengthened his stride. He was tall and fast, but to Jakani, it was as if he could fly. His feet barely felt the touch of the rocky path. His own running stride, never the most elegant or natural, seemed to have acquired the characteristics of silk. So … easy! As they came to a wider part, he drew abreast of the fellow.

  “How’s it going?”

  The messenger grunted, “Think you’re … fast … do you?”

  “You seem to be struggling, old bean pod. Take it easy before you burst something.”

  The other’s glance was openly shocked. Jakani was not breathing hard. Something was wrong with this picture, he thought. In that moment of distraction, the messenger let fly with an elbow.

  “Great festering – ah!”

  Laughter drifted back to him as Jakani picked himself up out of a berry bush. He felt his eye. That would bruise nicely, and his father would take him to task over it without fail. All at once, the familiar rage boiled up inside of him. Fight. Get him back. Make sure he paid for that unfairness –

  No. He knew how to beat this proud young man, and it was not by fighting. It would be by winning. Winning the right way.

  He took to the path like a man possessed. The rage inside of him was all the fuel he needed. The House Andamyria messenger was not far ahead. Jakani stalked him as light-footed as that tiger kitten in Tytiana’s cage, and twice as guileful. Coming up behind, he tapped him on the left shoulder, and then dodged around to the right the instant the startled fellow began to glance in that direction. He hooked the strap of the message pouch with his thumb, and with a fluid motion whipped it over his adversary’s head to snatch the bag away.

  “Hey!” The messenger lunged, but only clawed at empty air.

  “Missing something?”

  “Give that to me!”

  “Come and get it, slow-slug.” He dangled the bag. “Want this?”

  “Just you –”

  “Missed. Great Islands, did you eat rocks for breakfast? Move along now – missed again.” Jakani danced away down the path. He let the fellow chase him a little ways, before calling over his shoulder, “Meet you at the House!”

  He left a red-faced, puffing messenger far in his wake as he powered up the hill. Still, something was not right. Jakani had never run like this before.

  * * * *

  Tytiana glanced at the wall chronometer. “You’re on time, Dirt Picker. Barely.”

  Oh, just look at him swaggering in here, cool as a leafy green salad and twice as cocky as the day before last! She had to hand it to him. This wretch had courage. How much bravado would a chargrilled salad have once she was finished with him?

  He bowed respectfully. “O Choice Tytiana, I apologise. I had to wait for a House Andamyria messenger on the path. We had a little race. I was goading him.”

  She let her face harden. “Oh?”

  “Baiting House Andamyria is acceptable, I hope? Especially as I am still on time.”

  “On
time for your execution,” Tytiana said sweetly, and had the satisfaction of seeing Mister Dirt Picker, Third Class, stumble over his floppy bare feet.

  Actually, one of those feet was wrapped in a filthy bandage sodden with blood, and he was limping rather badly – which reminded her of that amazing overhead kick which had knocked aside huge, heavy shards of falling crysglass. And that cheeky swipe with her walking stick, followed by a perfect baton-twirl that assured her he knew exactly what to do with a stave as a weapon, for example. Tytiana would not be standing here by her workbench, fuming, were it not for him. It begged the question. How had he outrun a messenger on that foot?

  Who could trust a man with a feral glint like that – don’t look – in his sly eyes?

  Apparently apprehending the direction of her gaze, the Dirt Picker stepped self-consciously off the path inside the arboretum and made to scatter soil upon the splatters of blood he had left behind. “Might catch something,” he muttered. “Sorry. I’ll clean it up properly, Choice Tytiana. Promise.”

  “Need more stitches? Get over here, Dirt Picker.”

  “As you wish.”

  Aye, she would be much more comfortable with a needle in hand around this fellow. He made her feel so … weird. Not an easily dismissible sort of weird. This was a restless, audacious, bonfires-in-the-belly sort of weird. Sitting him down on the same stool as the day before, she lifted his foot and set it on her workbench with a purposeful air. “Now, the axe or the hacksaw?”

  “Whaa … aah, ha ha,” he spluttered nervously. “Sorry. Bad job on the doctoring – busy day, yesterday, see?”

  “Were your family harmed, Dirt Picker?”

  “No. But three lamko were killed.” She began to unwind the desperately unhygienic rags from around his foot. She suppressed an urge to shudder and rush off to wash her hands. Repeatedly. “A mother and her twin babies. Our neighbours just up the hill.”

  “I’m sorry. It wasn’t feral.”

  “The Dragon?”