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.
He 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.
He 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 schooclass="underline" 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.