Rites of Passage (12 page)

“You’ll change,” she whispered. “You’ll become like them. Hard. Unforgiving. You’ll forget what it is to love, to feel compassion. For how can those that rule by the Edict of the Church have room in their hearts for the forgiveness of human frailty?”

He took her hand. “I won’t change, Yancy.”

She turned to face him, and her soured eyes seemed to be staring at him. “But you already believe, in your heart, Yarrek. You have been indoctrinated by your parents. And from belief, it is only a short step to pressing your belief onto others, by force if necessary.”

“No!”

She laughed. “But you take in every word the Church spouts, and believe it for the ultimate truth!”

Yancy and her family belonged to the caste of Weavers. From an early age Yancy had woven fabulous tapestries of such colour and intricacy that they left Yarrek breathless. He had wondered how someone without sight could create such things of visual beauty. She had explained that she
felt
the colours, and kept the complex patterns in her head as she weaved.

The Weavers were renowned for their lack of convention, their irreverence, but because of the importance of their position in society, producing carpets both aesthetic and utilitarian, the Church chose to ignore their heterodoxy.

“Tell me again what the Church believes,” Yancy whispered now, mocking him. “Tell me that we are a bubble of air in a vast rock that goes on for ever and ever without end.”

He thought about that, even as she laughed at him, and as ever the concept of infinity dizzied him. “Tell me,” she went on, “that the Church believes that the bubble was formed from the breath of God, as He breathed life into dead rock, creating us, and the animals, and everything else in existence!”

“Yancy,” he pleaded, squeezing her hand.

She embraced him quickly, and he realised with surprise that she was weeping. “Oh, Yarrek, I will never see you again, will I? And if I do, you will be so changed I’ll never recognise the boy I love.”

And he could think of no words to say in response, no gesture he could make to reassure her.

A little later they removed their clothes and came together and made love slowly, under the eye of the quickening sun, and Yarrek wondered if it would be for the very last time.

~

H
e stowed his luggage in the warped timber carriage of the sail-rail train and found a window-seat. He stared out at the busy platform, and among the crowd picked out the unmoving trio of his father, mother and brother. They looked solemn in the glare of the mid-brightening sun. He lifted a hand to acknowledge that he had seen them, but only Jarrel responded with a wave.

He scanned the crowd for any sign of Yancy. Mere hours ago, as they lay limbs entwined on the yail sacks, she had promised that she would see him off at the station – but there were so many citizens swarming back and forth that he despaired of seeing her now.

Then the cry went up from the ship’s captain. The lox were whipped into motion and the chocks they were pulling sprang away from the rails. The carriage creaked as the great sails took the strain and eased the train slowly, at first, along the rails.

Desperately now Yarrek cast about the surging faces for Yancy – and then he heard the cry. “Yarrek, goodbye!”

She had shinned up a lamp-pole and was waving furiously in the direction of the train. He called, “Yancy, farewell!” and waved even though she would be unable to see the gesture.

She smiled, and waved all the more, and Yarrek turned to the tableau of his family and was heartened by the disapproving expressions on the faces of his mother and father, though Jarrel was grinning to himself like an idiot.

The train gained speed, the wind from the Hub sending it on its way. Yarrek felt tears stinging his eyes as he waved to his family and the small, clinging figure of the blind weaver girl.

He sat back in his seat and closed his eyes.

~

H
e awoke a little later to the thrumming vibration of the train’s wheels on the track.

Yarrek had never before been further Edgeward than his farm, and now, mixed with apprehension at what should await him at Icefast, he was fired by the excitement and curiosity of adventure. The future was a blank canvas on which he would paint his destiny; he knew neither what to expect from Icefast, though in books he had seen engravings of dour, stone buildings, nor what exactly might await him in the office of the Inquisitor.

The train had gained full speed now, and fields of yail and other crops sped by in a golden blur. Yarrek slid open the window and poked his head out, staring up at the bellying sails bearing the great green circle of the Hub Line. Almost directly overhead, the sun had attained full brightness and the heat was merciless.

He wondered how he might cope in Icefast, where the sun was a speck on the inward horizon, and the temperature never rose above zero.

He glanced around his compartment and tried to guess how many of his fellow passengers were bound all the way to Icefast; not many of them, judging by their scant luggage. Indeed, as the hours elapsed, and the train stopped at the stations along the way, many travellers alighted to be replaced by others who remained aboard only for short durations.

He began a letter to Yancy – addressed to the weaving house where she worked, and where a friend would read it out to her – describing the voyage so far, and promising that this letter would be the first of many.

Later he ate an evening meal packed by his mother, then went for a stroll along the corridor and up a flight of steps. The view from the upper deck, beneath the taut swell of the sails, was spectacular. He could see for what seemed like hundreds of miles in every direction: a sprawling panorama of yail fields, with here and there the spires and steeples of towns and villages.

Towards dimming, as he was contemplating going below and setting up his bunk, there was a rush of activity over by the starboard rail as a dozen passengers gathered and pointed.

In the distance, perhaps a mile away, Yarrek saw the humped remains of ancient buildings, tumbled stones upholstered by centuries of creeping grass and ferns. He recognised the ruins from picture books at school: this was the old city of Hassaver, the only existing remnant of the war that had almost brought the end of civilisation on Sunworld. Dreadful weapons had been brought to bear by implacable armies, fighting for territory long forgotten.

The history books said that the war had been fought perhaps ten thousand cycles ago, and that, after the devastation, strange beings had come among the people of Sunworld – beings that ecclesiastical scholars later claimed were angels – and brought about the formation of the Church, which in turn had brought lasting peace to the world and the eventual rebuilding of civilisation.

He hurried below, constructed a bunk from his extendable seat, and settled down to sleep as the sun dimmed quickly far above the hurtling train.

He was awoken in the early hours, and at first he couldn’t make out what had brought him awake. It felt as though ice had invaded his veins, and his body was rattling in a manner he had never experienced before. Instinctively he pulled the thin sheet over him, and then realised what had happened. He had read about this in books, but had never experienced the phenomenon of cold, the dead chill that enveloped him now. He exhaled, and his breath plumed above him like smoke.

Teeth chattering, in a way he might otherwise have found amusing, he sat up and peered through the window.

The landscape surrounding the trundling train had changed alarmingly. Gone were the reassuring fields of yail, to be replaced by smaller fields of some stubby green plant, and over everything lay a coating of what he would later learn was called frost, a scintillating silver dusting like powdered diamond.

He noticed that other passengers were straining to peer ahead, and he pressed his face to the icy glass and did likewise.

What he saw sent a throb of surprise and fear through his being. Ahead, stretching for the extent of the horizon, was a range of grey mountains capped by what he knew was snow. The rearing phalanx was forbidding, austere and steel-like in its breadth and total dearth of living colour. This, then, was the Edge, and the range before him the famous mountains that circumnavigated this plane of Sunworld. The thought that he was actually here, witnessing this sight, took his breath away.

At the next station, vendors boarded the carriage selling mugs of hot broth, and Yarrek gladly purchased one. Behind these vendors came others hawking thick clothing, serge pantaloons and padded jerkins, caps with ear flaps and things called gloves which you fitted over your hands to protect the fingers – according to the spiel of the vendors – from something called frostbite.

Yarrek ignored the vendors and opened the case his mother had packed. He dressed quickly, pulling thick garments over his old clothing. He felt at once constricted but snug, and wondered if he would ever become accustomed to being so lagged.

He settled down, more comfortable now, and stared in fascination through the window at the wonder of the passing world.

Two hours later Yarrek caught his first glimpse of Icefast.

If he had found the sight of the mountains a thing of wonder, then Icefast doubled his awe and sent his senses reeling. The engravings of his youth had done nothing to prepare him for either the scale of the city or the severity of its aspect.

Like the mountains, Icefast was grey, and like the mountains it reared stark and abrupt from the land. The uniformity of the tall grey buildings, the fact that constructions of such enormity had been planned and undertaken by his fellow man, made the sight of the serried facades all the more daunting.

Icefast filled the horizon between peaks as though the very mountains themselves had been found wanting and had been replaced. Yarrek made out ice-canals between the monolithic grey mansions, and on the canals the improbable sight of people skating back and forth, and others riding sleds drawn by teams of shaggy lox.

In due course the train slowed and entered a canyon of buildings. On the station platform Yarrek made out a thousand souls muffled to their ears, their breaths pluming in the cold. Strange cries and shouts came from the throng, vendors selling everything from cold cures to water-heated boots, mulled yail to grilled lox.

That morning, his father had given him instructions for his arrival in Icefast and directions to the House of the Inquisitors, where he would be given a bed in the apprentices’ dormitory. He would take a lox cart to the Avenue of Creation, and present himself to the porter at the House.

As he gathered his luggage and stepped from the carriage, his breath robbed by the severity of the cold that wrapped around him and invaded his lungs, he realised that his heart was pounding with both excitement and dread.

He hurried to a lox-cart stand, climbed aboard and gave his destination to a muffled dwarf of a jockey. The lox set off and he was gliding smoothly – no jolts on this ride – across the silvered canals of Icefast, and everything he beheld seemed new and wondrous. He saw nothing familiar, no fields of yail, or timber buildings, or kite-fish sailing around the sun. Instead all was drear and austere, the gaunt buildings hewn from great stone blocks, the thoroughfares filled with ice. It was the start of dimming, and while back home the air would still be bright with sunlight, this far away from the Hub the sun was but a distant disk. A strange twilight filled the air, and the city was illuminated by naked flames in great sconces set atop pillars flanking the ice-canals.

The cart slowed at last and halted before the tall, pillared entrance of the House of Inquisitors; Yarrek paid the jockey and climbed down. Keeping his footing with difficulty as he negotiated paving stones slick with ice, he stepped towards the ancient timber doors and passed inside.

He was met by a grim-faced porter, who escorted him without a word to a tiny cell furnished with a hard, narrow bed and a trunk for his clothing. He passed a fitful night, tossing and turning, and dreaming – when sleep came in the early hours – of home and sunlight and Yancy. At dawn, a loud rapping on the door of his cell awoke him, and the porter led Yarrek, along with a dozen other would-be Inquisitors, to the lecture halls overlooking the Avenue of Creation.

~

F
or the next ten brightenings – though this near the Edge the word was something of a misnomer, for a brightening never achieved much more than a pewter half-light – Yarrek rose early and hurried from his spartan cell to the lecture halls.

There, along with his fellow students, he pored over ancient manuscripts and studied more modern apologia. In the afternoons, after a short meal break during which he ate slabs of cold porridge and watered wine in a silent refectory, he returned to the lecture halls where he would listen, along with the other bored and nodding novices, to a different tutor every brightening who spoke at length on varying aspects of Church law and judiciary practice. At the end of the lessons he would sit a written exam on what he had learned so far, and he would have to dredge his memory for the arcane and abstruse tenets of ecclesiastical lore.

At dimming, after a substantial meal of meat broth and yailbread, he would retire to his cell and compose letters to Yancy and his family. To the latter he would paint a picture of diligence and interest, but to Yancy he would tell the truth; that he found his studies tedious, and life in Icefast at best alienating. He missed the warmth of all that was familiar, he wrote, but most of all he missed Yancy.

He made no friends among his fellow apprentices, for fraternisation was forbidden. Meals were taken in silence, and silence was the rule during study periods. At dimming, Church porters escorted the novices back to their cells, and, though their doors were not locked, Yarrek suspected that guards were posted at the end of the corridor to discourage nocturnal wanderings.

On his eleventh brightening in Icefast, the rules were relaxed. Nothing was stated overtly, but Yarrek noticed that whispers at mealtimes were not admonished, and the porters no longer escorted the novices from the lecture halls. He made friends with a fat youth from a city around the Edge of Sunworld, who pined for the flat ice-fields of home just as Yarrek pined for the sun-parched plains of the Hub.