Tymon's Flight

by Mary Victoria

  Not everyone aboard the greatship shared his enthusiasm for adventure, however. As the Stargazer drifted out over the Void, the members of her crew grew irritable and morose, stiffly avoiding the sides of the ship. Gravity menaced from the airy depths. The Gap was too wide for the other side to be seen: to set sail across it was an act of faith. Superstitious to the last, the men turned their backs on the offensive emptiness as long as they could. Tymon alone gazed eagerly ahead as the sky expanded into a cold grey dome and whistling space surrounded the dirigible. It drew him irresistibly; he stopped even pretending to drag his brush over the deck boards, distracted by curiosity. He sidled closer to the side of the ship and, when no one was watching, shirked his scrubbing duties to peep over the deck-rails.

  The Storm stared back at him. A brazen expanse of cloud lay beneath the dirigible, vast and fathomless, and an updraft whipped his face. He gawked at the abyss, fascinated. Within the Central Canopy the view downwards was obscured by the lower branchways and leaf-forests, where it was not entirely blocked by the supporting column of the trunk. Argosians never saw more of the Storm than a smear of purple at the bottom of the West Chasm. But in the wide-open Gap no such protective barrier existed. The mass of churning clouds spread unbroken to the horizon. Tymon forced himself to look steadily into the Void though every fibre of his being, every ounce of his training and upbringing screamed at him to turn away, to flee the dangerous emptiness. The proximity of the Storm shocked him. The highest clouds lay only two hundred feet beneath the dirigible, if he could trust his eyes. He had never imagined the final boundary of the world would be right there, so close to his everyday life. He felt the sudden, irrational urge to jump over the railing, to give himself up to the grey gulf and fall, fall, fall forever.

  A hand clapped onto his shoulder, breaking the spell. Misho pulled him back from the railing and rapped his forehead smartly with his knuckles.

  ‘Don’t stare at the wind,’ growled the Jay. ‘You’ll call up the Storm, choirboy!’

  Tymon returned to his deck-swabbing in subdued silence. The glimpse of the Storm had put him in mind of Galliano and of all the opportunities that were irretrievably lost to him. As the afternoon wore on and the buoyant air-currents that had spurred them through the canopy dissipated in the Gap, the ship began to drift at the mercy of the winds. The anxiety of the crew deepened. Even the captain restricted his orders to clipped monosyllables, and for hours the only sound was the creak of ropes and the breath of the men. Several times Tymon noticed his crewmates gazing askance at the slack sails and mouthing charms, or touching their forelocks in the sign to ward off evil. It occurred to him that he was very far from the world of his childhood. Neither the serene faith of the priests nor the plainspoken piety of the common folk of Argos had any place on the greatship. Here, only the unforgiving weather spirits held sway.

  By the end of the afternoon, the sailors’ whispered entreaties appeared to have had their desired effect. A brisk breeze filled the mainsail and the dirigible sped through the final furlongs of the Gap, her weatherboards creaking. At the fifth hour a cheer went up from the lookout on the main mast: the Eastern Canopy had been sighted. The mood on board the Stargazer lifted, though the work redoubled as the crew battled to keep control of the ship in the rising wind. By sunset the arms of the canopy stretched out to meet them, a bank of shadow in the failing light. Tymon squinted apprehensively at the sky. The ship was heading directly for bad weather. The Eastern Canopy lay between a rack of high thunderclouds and the seething blanket of the Storm. Funnels of vapour had formed between the two levels, glinting hypnotically in the evening sun. From a distance they looked almost beautiful. The boy gazed at them curiously. He turned to Aran as the first mate emerged from a nearby cargo hatch.

  ‘What are those cloud-things, sir?’ he asked. He pointed to the funnels.

  Aran did not answer him but muttered an oath, hurrying to the deck-rail. He scowled at the murky eastern horizon.

  ‘Wake up, Misho!’ he hollered up to the watchtower. The Jay’s surprised face peeped over the edge of the crow’s nest as the first mate gestured in exasperation towards the columns of cloud. ‘Were you going to let us fly into the Maelstrom, Jay fool?’

  Misho’s warning whistle echoed over the ship. Aran hurried back towards the captain’s quarters, pushing past the bewildered Tymon.

  ‘Those pretty things are funnel-winds,’ he barked over his shoulder. ‘They’ll tear up this ship like a piece of bread if we don’t out-run ‘em!’

  The door to Safah’s cabin burst open before the first mate could reach it.

  ‘Storm-posts,’ boomed the Captain, striding onto the deck. ‘We’ve got a runner, boys!’

  The ship’s crew sprang into action. The wind, longed-for at first, had now intensified to an unwelcome gale. They fought to trim the sails and tie down any loose equipment. The dirigible hurtled towards the canopy and the sky dimmed rapidly above them. The first drops of rain were already splattering Tymon’s face and hands as he helped Misho pull canvas coverings over the dirigible’s life-craft. The four ether balloons were mounted on what appeared to be ridiculously small passenger baskets. He wondered how all the men could possibly fit inside them. It was the first time he had encountered anything but clement weather on their journey; although the Stargazer was solidly made and as safe as a dirigible could be, the experience was unnerving. He could not help glancing up from his work every few minutes at the tossing gloom of the Eastern Canopy. The funnels of cloud were much larger than he had thought. One rose almost directly in the path of the dirigible, a spinning trunk of vapour at least a hundred feet across, inky black against the fading sky. He could make out what appeared to be shards of bark caught in the vortex.

  ‘I told you not to stare at the Storm,’ grumbled Misho, struggling to pin down his corner of the flapping canvas over the life-craft. ‘Now look what you’ve done.’

  Tymon could not tear his eyes away from the column of cloud bearing down on the ship. With growing alarm, he realised that he had misjudged the scale of the whirlwind once more. It was not shards of bark but entire twigs of the Tree that spun in the vortex. To reach the canopy they would have to pass between two of the writhing funnels, through a rapidly shrinking space. He stared in horror as the dirigible rode towards the columns on the screeching wind, bound for certain destruction. A wall of impassable black cloud rose before them. The rain abruptly intensified and became a downpour, plunging the dirigible into obscurity. The ship shook like a leaf in the wind. The Captain’s bellows grew distant in the watery uproar and Misho yelled something that Tymon could not make out. The boy shook his head uncomprehendingly.

  ‘Get below!’ the other screamed in his face. ‘Now!’

  He lurched away from Tymon towards the last open hatchway. The rest of the crew were already retreating down the stairs to the hold, ducking beneath a piece of canvas that had been stretched in front of the doorway. Tymon had hardly taken three paces after them before a swift shadow loomed above the deck, accompanied by a blast of air so strong that it pulled him off his feet and threw him against the portside railing. A gigantic shape swept over his head, missing it by inches. Something smashed into the main mast with a crack like a colossal whiplash. The whole dirigible shuddered and groaned. The deck tilted sideways at an extreme angle, jerking him treacherously close to oblivion. He recovered from his shock just in time to hang grimly on to the rails, and began to pull himself back up the pitching deck, hand over hand. He dared not imagine what had hit the mast. It sounded as if an entire crossbeam had been ripped off the greatship.

  ‘All…below.’ The Captain’s words were ripped away by the squall. ‘…sacks…gone. Drop…ballast. Fill…sacks…’

  Tymon grasped that the ether sacks on the port side of the dirigible were damaged. The ship was listing dangerously. He could not tell if they were losing altitude, for the space beyond the dirigible was a roaring darkness. He crawled on all fours towards the open hatchway, blinking in
the rain. A feeble luminosity escaped from its doors. He fixed his eyes on the guttering beacon until he was able to roll himself under the wildly flapping canvas, scrabbling with aching fingers over the threshold. A hand came out of the hole to grab the collar of his tunic and drag him to safety. In another moment he was propped, dripping and breathless, against the wall of the stairwell. Safah’s mad eye gleamed at him in the light of a drunken basket-lantern.

  ‘So shall the unbeliever be chastised by the tempests of divine wrath,’ he intoned.

  Tymon had learned that there was a hidden side to the bluff Lantrian’s character. Safah was a closet mystic, a quoter of scripture and saga, known to emerge on the stern deck armed with a book of poetry, which he proceeded to read aloud to his captive audience. The storm seemed to reawaken this dramatic urge; his gaze was wild as he grinned at the boy. It was a moment before he remembered to release Tymon’s collar.

  ‘Now, get below and make yourself useful, or make yourself scarce,’ he said, collecting himself. ‘We’re going to lose some ballast.’

  ‘What was that noise, sir?’ Tymon asked. ‘Did one of the masts break?’

  Safah gave a harsh guffaw. ‘Good Lantrian hardwood?’ he scoffed. ‘Never. We clipped the edges of the twister. That sound you heard was a twig caught in the wind. Could have taken your head off. Out of the way now, boy—there’s no room here for layabouts!’

  The last part of the Captain’s speech coincided with the appearance of two sailors in the stairwell, staggering out of the hold with a large crate balanced on their shoulders. Tymon was pushed roughly aside as they hoisted their burden up the stairs and out of the hatch. He stared after them, his heart pounding. He had suddenly remembered that the pilgrim girl would be hiding in just such an empty crate, marked for ballast. The thrashing rain caught the light of Safah’s lamp, spraying bright droplets off the sailors’ backs and heads as they inched down the tilted deck. He watched, aghast, as the crate tumbled over the railing into the dark abyss. It was an agonising minute before he was sure. The box had been open, and empty.

  ‘…ones at the back, by the galley stores,’ he heard Aran crying from below. ‘Should be good to go.’

  Tymon waited no longer but leapt down the steps towards the hold. Everything was skewed with the slant of the ship and he tripped in the uneven stairwell, staggering desperately on. He knew he had to find the pilgrim girl before the crew did. The sanctions for stowaways on board an Argosian dirigible were harsh, and Samiha’s crime was compounded by her origins and her sex. Even if she did not go down with her crate, it was likely the Captain would have her thrown overboard as punishment. The boy stumbled over the last few steps and came up short against the entrance to the hold.

  He could hardly make sense of what he saw through the doors. Monstrous, jittering shadows danced up from the sailors’ lamps along the walls of the cargo bay, creating more confusion than light. The crates were all heaped on the port side, dislodged when the ship had been hit. The timbers of the hull rasped and groaned. The men were checking the contents of the boxes under Aran’s direction, forming a chain to the stairs. Tymon moved hurriedly aside before he could be pressed into service. He threaded a path between the jumbled crates towards the back of the hold, examining each of the boxes he passed as thoroughly as he dared. But the pilgrim girl was nowhere to be seen. He began to hope that she had abandoned her hiding place before the sailors arrived, perhaps making for the storeroom or the galley. He was about to test out his theory when he heard Misho complaining loudly nearby.

  ‘I swear it’s full, Aran.’

  The sailor stood on the far side of a large crate; he examined it with an air of puzzlement.

  ‘All the ones marked “Marak depot” are empty, numbskull.’ The first mate answered him from across the hold, his voice hoarse with shouting over the din of the tempest. ‘The spice was unloaded in Argos city.’

  ‘This one weren’t.’

  ‘Green grace, I don’t have time for this—’ The flickering shadows from Aran’s basket lantern approached. ‘Did you check inside?’

  ‘No,’ Misho answered in sullen tones. ‘Lid’s stuck. Wedged shut.’

  He was wrong. Tymon saw with a jolt of dismay that the lid was moving. The crate was almost the height of a man and rested on its end, opening on the side facing away from Misho. The boy watched in horror as thin white fingers emerged and gripped the edges of the lid, sliding it open.

  ‘Let’s have a look then—’ The lantern light jumped around the box ahead of the men.

  Tymon threw himself at the crate. Before the sailors could reach the opening he had smashed the lid shut with his body’s momentum. He must have pinched Samiha’s fingers in the process, but he heard no cry of pain from inside the box. She would have bitten her lips through rather than make a sound, he thought with admiration.

  ‘It’s empty,’ he gabbled, as Aran and Misho stared curiously at him around the corner of the box. He opened the lid a crack, taking care to do so on the edge furthest from the two men, and made a show of looking within to make sure. ‘Yes. Totally empty. I’ll help you carry it, Misho.’

  He had caught a glimpse of Samiha’s pale face at the back of the crate, her eyes wide in the darkness. He did not meet his crewmates’ gaze. The white, staring visage was burned into the air in front of him and hung everywhere he looked, giving the lie to his words.

  ‘Well,’ Aran responded slowly, ‘That’s what it should be. Empty.’ He grimaced and pushed Misho back the way they had come. ‘Just like your head is, you Jay fool.’

  The other sailor scowled in suspicion at Tymon, and only suffered himself to be dragged reluctantly after Aran, protesting: ‘It was stuck. I swear it.’

  ‘It’s stuck, it’s stuck,’ jeered the first mate. ‘Your mother said that when your fat head came through. No, I don’t want to hear another word. We have work to do.’

  The two men disappeared, still arguing. Tymon seized the opportunity to open the lid a crack. A ray of light illuminated a staring eye inches away from his. Samiha was right there, a breath away from him.

  ‘Quick, let me out,’ she murmured.

  ‘Where to?’ objected the boy. There was no shelter nearby, nowhere she could go without being seen by one of the crewmen. He shook his head. ‘There’s no safe place.’

  ‘You know where this box is going, don’t you?’ she retorted. ‘We must try!’

  The sailors’ discussion had come to a close. Aran’s light bobbed away and Tymon could hear Misho approaching the other side of the crate, cursing.

  ‘Too late,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll find something else. Trust me.’

  ‘Wait—’

  He did not allow her to finish, but pushed the lid shut again just as Misho poked his head around the box.

  ‘Well, choirboy,’ the Jay ground out sulkily, ‘you’d better be some use to me now. Get ready to heave.’

  Heave they did, lugging their burden through the chaos and clamour of the hold, past the men redistributing the empty cargo boxes. The ship was already righting itself, Tymon noticed distractedly. The emergency sacks had been inflated. He felt as if he were moving through a dream. The waking world had become a nightmare, turning his best intentions awry. He had told Samiha to trust him but he did not know how to help her. They moved in plain sight of the sailors—there was no opportunity to let her out of the box. His anxiety intensified as they climbed the stairs, past Safah holding up the flapping canvas in the hatchway. He felt numb, unable to make a decision.

  On the deck, raindrops whipped his face and hair, slapping him awake. It was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead in the downpour. He could just make out the lumping forms of the port life-craft beneath their coverings. As his eye settled on the vague outline of the deck-rail, he knew at last what he must do. He forced himself to wait for the right moment, to stumble after Misho all the way to the rail and hoist the box upwards until it was poised over the howling emptiness. Then, gritting his teeth in a silent pra
yer, he allowed the corners of rough wood to slip between his fingers.

  For a heartbeat he thought that he had miscalculated the distance. The crate was too far over the edge. It would fall into the gulf. The box teetered and balanced a precarious instant before crashing down onto the deck, knocking him backwards. He skidded, slipped and fell flat on his back on the sodden planks. Misho gave a yelp of surprise and let go of his end of the box. Gasping, Tymon reached out one flailing arm to push the lid off the crate. It rolled away and clattered against the railing. He was dimly aware of a dark silhouette leaping over him in the pouring rain. The box provided a momentary screen between it and Misho, leaving the path clear to the life-craft. He could only hope that the girl had seen her opportunity and made for one of the covered baskets. There was an instant of breathless expectation as he stared into the swirling drops of rain. Then Misho was bending over him through the deluge.

  ‘You all right?’ he cried. He gave no indication that he had seen the shadow jumping from the crate. His concern quickly turned to annoyance as Tymon dragged himself to a seated position and regained his breath. ‘Anything broken, mulchbrain?’ snapped the Jay.

  ‘No.’ Tymon rose shakily to his feet. A quick glance confirmed that the deck was clear. The pilgrim girl was nowhere to be seen. ‘I slipped,’ he said. ‘The boards are wet—’

  ‘Damn right they’re wet. You’re a sharp one,’ Misho spat sideways onto the waterlogged boards in disgust. ‘Any more words of wisdom for us tonight, choirboy?’

  Tymon gave a weak smile. Relief coursed over him like rain, and a glow of pride warmed him through the squall. He had succeeded. Samiha was safe. He fell back a step as the captain materialised in front him, shielding his basket-lantern with an oilcloth.