Tytiana

by Marc Secchia

  * * * *

  Having extracted a crossbow bolt from the muscle of Jakani’s lower left thigh and strapped up her ankle with cloth cut from dead men’s trousers, they searched the bodies for useful items and came away with a small trove – a pair of sparkstones, a couple of useable jackets, weapons galore, and a handful of brass drals. One of the men had been carrying a javelin. Jakani passed it to Tytiana. “Walking stick, if it helps?”

  “Thanks.”

  He did not want to steal any personal objects, but a leather belt pouch made a useful home for the ever-present egg, and before he popped it inside, he tapped the shell gently and whispered:

  “I don’t know what you’re up to, buddy, but thanks for being there whenever one of us has needed you.”

  A tiny tapping noise answered from inside the egg.

  Tytiana said, “See? I’m sure it understands us. Sorry to call you an ‘it,’ girl or boy or whatever you are.”

  He nodded. “I hope we can find a good home for this little chap. I’m never leaving you behind again; no, I’m not.”

  “Aww, aren’t we sweet,” Tytiana teased him for his baby language. Jakani made a face at her. “Right, let’s hobble along and see if we can find out where those men came from.”

  “Aye. I’m hungry, too, and the notion of oversized rat or whatever those things were just doesn’t fill my heart with the blossoms of spring. You want to lean on me, or shall I lean on you?”

  “One rule. No unauthorised kissing!”

  On that note, they limped up to the well-hidden crack from which the men had appeared, finding there a narrow, sandy tunnel that led deeper within the Island. Jakani picked up a lantern and scratched his armpit vigorously. “Gaah. Do you have any idea how much all this rock powder is going to itch?”

  “I don’t want to see you scratching in any socially unacceptable places, Dirt Picker.”

  “Like here, o Choice?”

  “Ew!”

  “Or picking rock-snot out of my –”

  “So you think you have license to be crude now, do you? What you need is a good bath with some actual soap, or I shall start calling you Dirty Nose Picker, Fifth Grade. Understood?”

  Jakani daringly swatted her behind. “Understood, Tytiana.”

  She elbowed him smartly in the ribs. “That’s way too expensive for you. Hands off.”

  The tunnel meandered a ways beneath the Island, perhaps an ancient watercourse once cut away by water leaching through the Island’s foundation. At one point they broke out into the open and found themselves facing a rickety rope bridge across an unknowable chasm. It was only ten or eleven feet wide, but a frigid gale howled down the gap. Marvellous weather. They hurried across as best they could. Jakani was grateful for his thick jacket so that he could huddle inside of it and not show Tytiana how badly his stomach was churning. Heights? Mouldy ropes? No thanks.

  Perhaps half a mile beyond the bridge they came to a divide in the tunnel. Jakani pointed to their right. “The men came from that way.”

  Tytiana lifted her nose. “But I think I smell meriatite this way. Maybe there’s a Dragonship here. We could escape.”

  “In this weather? Escape to where?”

  “Well, we could see and maybe take advantage of a break in the storm. It’s blowing toward Immadia, isn’t it? We could try to make it there.”

  “The word you’re looking for is ‘blasting,’ and, neither of us is an experienced Dragonship pilot. You’re planning to find a tiny dot in ten thousand square leagues of Cloudlands, in the middle of a – shh. Someone’s coming.” He listened intently. “Lots of someones. I mean –”

  “I know what you mean. Hurry!”

  Jakani was less than keen on the Dragonship idea, but with Tytiana charging into the lead, he had little choice but to follow along. Besides, he was not in great shape to be fighting the number of men he thought he heard. The regular cadence of their boot steps suggested a disciplined troop marching in time. While that was strange, a different kind of churning in his gut told him that now was not the time to pause and ask polite questions. Barbarians. Cannibals. He might just be eaten, but he could imagine much worse would lie in wait for a girl who fell into their grasp.

  Ten minutes of rapid trot-hobbling later, they broke out into a cavern that clearly doubled as a Dragonship hangar and general storage area for quite the most impressive collection of trash he had ever seen. Somebody liked their ‘treasures’. Phew. His nostrils burned as if he had sniffed acid. Barrels, fungus-ridden mattresses, building materials, trunks and chests of clothing and sacks of mouldering food, were among the items he could identify, and were piled haphazardly two Dragons tall toward the back of the cavern. The side closest to the weather boasted two wooden sliding doors with enough holes in the ancient timbers to just about pretend to hold back the wind, and in a clear space beside the doors, someone had been restoring a Dragonship.

  It was tattered. Patched. Stitched together like a patchwork cloth created by a team of blindfolded monkeys. The cabin beneath the tattered hydrogen sack looked as if a Dragon had chewed a hole through the side. But somewhere within the mess, a meriatite engine purred sweetly and the balloon appeared to be holding … well, some gas. The craft strained at a few mooring ropes that had been tied to water-filled barrels, a blacksmith’s anvil and half a shed.

  He gasped, “You want to fly in that?”

  “Prefer to take up residence in a cooking pot? Do you want to know what they said to me back there?”

  “Ah …”

  Right. Straight back to Choice of the House mode, as he had suspected.

  “Are they still coming this way?”

  He listened again. It was hard to tell over the whistling of the wind, but she was right again. Coming at a run. Dull anger slumped like spent fire in his chest as he realised he had forgotten to erase their trail. Idiot! Of course their barefoot footprints would stand out like a pink Dragon flying cartwheels around the Moons!

  “Go, Tytiana. Get her aloft!”

  He cast about the trash heap. The moment he started to push those doors open, the incoming troop would hear and – ah. Useful. A stack of what had to be Sylakian war-hammers. Noting that place, he sprinted to the hangar doors and shoved them open one at a time. Shouts erupted from the tunnel they had just left. Tytiana was inside the crysglass-fronted navigation cabin apparently kicking something with her wooden foot. Hopefully, that worked. He ran around the sides, hacking at the hawsers that held the craft down. The wind was already starting to push it sideways when the first men broke into the hangar.

  “Stop them!”

  Jakani dive-rolled beneath the cabin. Coming up beside the stack of hammers, he picked one up and hurled it overhand. Whap-whap-whap! The soldiers scattered. Suffering caroli, they were well trained. He picked up hammers and sent a couple spinning into the tunnel, garnering cries of anguish. A couple of crossbows peeked out of the wreckage and from behind barrels. He exploded a barrel into a soldier’s face with a well-placed throw. That made every head duck again.

  “Get the turbines going!”

  “Can’t –” He could not hear the rest.

  Not that he would have done much better, but surely there was a lever called ‘turbines’ somewhere and she was just looking right past it? Because going out in that storm without a means of propulsion … a bolt flitted past his ear, buzzing like a very large, angry hornet. Or he could wait to be spitted like a fowl prepared for the roast. Spinning hammers left and right, he kept the men of Herliss pinned down. Suddenly the engine coughed and the whole vessel lurched toward the door.

  “Jakani!”

  Abandoning the hammers, he leaped toward their craft. With one hand shoved through the doorway on the side of the navigation cabin, he heaved the Dragonship toward the hangar doors. The wind fought him, knocking the huge balloon this way and that. Quarrels sparked on the stone between his feet. A half-dozen of the bearded Northerners gave chase, but he took a second to throw the sword he had stolen
at them. They ducked, and then his feet were running over a howling storm.

  The wind slammed the Dragonship sideways and then dragged them away along the rocky granite cliffs. In the cabin, Tytiana was fighting the old wooden helm as she tried to wrestle the vessel away from a spire of rock that loomed to his right. He heard a wild cry as one of the men tried to grab for a trailing hawser, lost his balance, and fell away into the darkness. The turbines whined and stuttered, before falling silent. Not good! Rock slewed toward his trailing feet. No way to avoid that. Obeying his instinct, Jakani lifted his legs, waited a second, and then slammed both feet down onto frozen rock to shove the Dragonship further around the threatening spire. For several long seconds, he was running sideways with the weight of a storm-driven Dragonship upon his back. He heard wood splintering, but that was only a secondary cabin further back along the vessel – hopefully not the engine room!

  Out into clear space again. His fingers clawed at the slick metal doorframe, desperate to gain purchase. Slipping … no. Safe.

  White sleeted across his vision. The wind was beastly, whipping blinding flurries of snow around the Dragonship as it stuttered along, but he saw now that the Island curved away from them and they were out in the open, hanging over nothingness, as Herliss receded into the distance.

  ‘Better like this, or worse?’ his father sometimes used to say during his warrior training.

  He clutched the doorway. Better for that girl who struggled across the swaying cabin toward him now, her face pale but determined. Worse for the fact that they were now being swept into the unknown by one of the legendary Northern storms, which liked to hammer Islands with deadly blasts of snow and hail, and they had to find Immadia somewhere out there in this immensity of unknown Cloudlands, like trying to identify one single fruit in the entirety of Helyon’s orchards.

  Tytiana braced herself and reached for his hand. “It’s warmer in here.”

  “Aye, if we close the ruddy door.”

  He heaved and scraped himself into the cabin, and heard the door shut behind him. Tytiana latched it. “You’ve grown a white beard.”

  “I feel like an icicle. Maybe … a kiss would warm me up?”

  “Right beneath a very leaky hydrogen sack? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Oh. I didn’t know. Hydrogen’s flammable?

  “Explosive. You silly lamko, you didn’t know that?” He glared at the storm. Here it came. Dumb, ignorant lamko jokes. He’d suffer them all his life whenever someone compared the two of them. Tytiana said, “Thanks, though. That was some escape.”

  “It was, wasn’t it? Didn’t know you could drive a Dragonship like a champion – ah, do they race Dragonships?”

  “Nope.” She strutted back to the wheel. “Aren’t I just awesome?”

  His jaw dangled involuntarily. “Why are you acting like me?”

  “Because you were, and are, an awesome lava monster as well as being an awesome Human being. I don’t think this wheel is doing much at all. Shall we go take a look at the engine?”

  Jakani made a show of combing his long hair. “Shouldn’t I look perfect first?”

  Tytiana stuck out her tongue. “Haven’t done this since I was five years old. Please don’t do anything to ignite me, you madcap pirate. Heh. Never stolen anything either. You are clearly a terrible influence. Seriously, however, I’ve no desire to expire in a pyre of flame, so as much as I’m pining for another kiss, the rule is …”

  He sighed. “No kissing.”

  “No kissing.”

  “Unless we’re standing naked in the middle of a snowfield?”

  Tytiana shook his hand solemnly. “So done.”

  Chapter 19: Man Overboard!

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING dawned bright and fair. The storm had petered out, leaving a few wispy cirrus clouds high overhead perhaps as a proclamation of innocence. Tytiana woke with the suns beaming full on her face, sat up, and said, “We may have a problem.”

  Jakani snored.

  “It’s a beautiful day. Aren’t you usually up before dawn?”

  Apparently, the pile of sacking they had managed to rescue from the wrecked back cabin and pull here to the front navigation cabin, which was the only area of the Dragonship reasonably sealed against the cold and wind, was his new best friend. Cute boy – he cradled the dragonet’s egg right against his stomach. Gently snoring. She blew a few dark strands off his cheek. Odd how his ears almost lacked lobes. Was that an Eastern feature too? Mmm, he still looked mischievous when he was asleep. And kissa … no. Not that. Too dangerous.

  Exiting the navigation cabin through the door that led to a very narrow interior corridor which provided access to the three other cabins in this design for a compact, long-range trader Dragonship, she walked several paces down to the engine room. The meriatite furnace engine was still warm, but the flames had guttered. She stoked up a small blaze with wood chips before adding several hunks of long-burning, dense ooliti wood. This much was elementary. One heated the chamber in which the hydrogen-bearing meriatite rock would melt at relatively low temperatures, before it dripped down into a water chamber which initiated the reaction that produced hydrogen gas. Two sacks provided the necessary meriatite. One was three-quarters empty, she noted, but the other was full. This would be enough to feed the huge envelope balloon above their heads which provided lifting power for the vessel, and was carefully separated from the cabin by the standard gap of five feet. A dozen strong hawsers spanned this gap, leading from the cabin’s lightweight frame to a loose rope netting that covered the entire oblong balloon, all of seventy-five feet in length.

  The meriatite furnace engine could also drive the turbines, however, and those were where her main concern lay. The turbines were silent, perhaps storm-damaged, or they had never been repaired properly in the first instance. They must be hundreds of leagues from land in a leaky Dragonship, with no means of propulsion save the wind, which had picked this moment to die completely.

  She returned to the main cabin. “Jakani? Oh, how the man snoreth,” she said sarcastically.

  Time to scour the vessel for food. Maybe some thoughtful soul had stocked it with a view to holding a feast fit for a High Master?

  Not so much. She found a basket holding eleven small scraps of stale bread which could be gnawed possibly without breaking one’s teeth, a skein of berry wine, and two barrels of scummy water meant for the engine.

  “Breakfast!” Tytiana prodded him with her toe.

  “Ah, I was waiting for that,” said the scabrous scallywag, sitting up fresh and ready. “How kind you are to take care of my needs.”

  Tytiana came within an inch of kissing him with extreme prejudice.

  Instead, while trying to extract sustenance from the rock-hard bread, they talked about their becalmed Dragonship. They discussed how their families might be doing, pooled their knowledge about Dragonships and discovered it would barely make a drip, let alone a respectable puddle, and then scoured their pirated vessel from bow to stern. The wrecked rear cabin had apparently held a great deal more trash, so that was little loss, but they did discover a couple of grapnels that might double as landing hooks, spare rope, a repair kit consisting of a roll of unfamiliar material, assorted spanners, a pot of glue, and an axe. The rest, they sorted into flammable and non-flammable piles. The flammable materials – archives from a merchant’s dullest shipping ledgers, for example – they placed beside the all-important engine. Lose enough lighter-than-air gas or the ability to generate it, and they’d sink into the Cloudlands long before they found Immadia.

  They discovered a couple of flasks of fiery Sylakian spirits taped carefully beneath a bunk in the second cabin. “Party time,” Jakani said cheerfully.

  “We should keep it to drink ourselves insensible before we perish in the Cloudlands,” Tytiana said dolefully.

  “We should drink it with kissing,” he leered.

  “Alcohol this strong would just explode,” she retorted. “Keep to the rule.”

&nbs
p; “I hate rules.”

  “Me too.”

  After this largely fruitless search, Jakani climbed aloft to check the turbines set below the hydrogen sack either side of the lightweight cabin, while Tytiana tried to make sense of the paltry few items of navigation equipment.

  When Jakani returned, she said automatically, “Report, Dirt Picker.”

  He stiffened, then laughed it off. “One, you are still beautiful. Two, we really do need to fix your hair before that dragonet mistakes it for a nest. Three, the turbines are pretty badly damaged. One’s missing a few blades, one is missing its main housing, and the other two aren’t in the best shape either. Also, we have some holes up top that could do with patching.”

  “Will you do that?”

  “I’m … actually, not so great with heights.”

  “Pretend you’re climbing a fenturi tree,” Tytiana said carelessly, tapping the compass. It certainly wasn’t pointing anywhere near North. It kept pointing at her. Jakani’s right eyebrow danced at the sight. She snorted, “No smart comments, alright?”

  “You’ve a magnetic personality.”

  “Do you want to drive this compass? Or get the patching?”

  “Look, I’m man enough to tell you I almost lost my delicious breakfast up there. You’ve flown before, probably plenty of times.”

  “You were fine with the Dragon.”

  They argued this way and that, became irritated with each other, and Jakani eventually gave in to his pride and her wheedling, and ventured aloft. Five minutes later, his breakfast did indeed adorn the main window of the navigation cabin. He sheepishly rappelled down to clean up.

  That afternoon, they laboured on dismantling the turbines as far as possible to see if they could salvage or swap enough parts to make at least one work. That was a major, tiring and finicky piece of work, because the previous owner of the Dragonship seemed to have been trying to do the same, only their idea of repairs seemed to involve glue, boot soles – literally – and a great deal of hope. The scientist in Tytiana was having kittens over this. Jakani eventually banished her to do something useful.