“I’m glad to hear it,” Trinchil said. “I’d be the last man in the world to tell another how to conduct his business, but may I offer you a pertinent piece of advice?”
“Please do,” Bartan replied, wondering why he found the older man’s grin less than reassuring.
Trinchil clamped an enormous hand on each of Bartan’s shoulders and gave him a mock-playful shake. “If, by any chance, you fail to find good land beyond those hills—keep on flying in a straight line and be sure to put as many leagues as you can between the two of us.”
The boat was handling well and—had he not been fearful of a sudden and catastrophic failure of the gasbag—the experience of being airborne again might have produced an equivalent lift in Bartan’s spirits.
Enigmatic though it had seemed to the farmers, the engine designed and built by his father had only three basic controls. A throttle fed pikon and halvell into a combustion chamber, and the hot miglign gas thus generated was exhausted through an aft-facing jet pipe to propel the boat. The pipe could be swivelled laterally by means of a tiller to give some directional control; and when required another lever diverted gas upwards into the envelope to create and maintain buoyancy. As miglign was lighter than air, even when cool, the assemblage was compact and efficient.
Bartan took the boat to a height of fifty feet and sailed it in a circle around the wagons, partly to please Sondeweere, mainly to check that the extra strain of turning would not be too much for the attachment gussets. Relieved at finding the craft still airworthy for the time being at least, he gave a stately wave to the watching farmers and set a course to the west. It was just past noon, with the sun very close to the zenith, so he was riding in the protective shadow of the gasbag and could view his surroundings with unusual clarity. The marshlands stretched out ahead of him like pastel-tinted snow, in contrast to which the distant hills seemed almost black. Apart from the occasional flash of an extra-bright meteor there was little to be seen in the sky. Its brilliance was overpainting all but the brightest stars, and even the Tree—the most important constellation in the southern heavens—was barely visible to his left.
After a few minutes of uneventful flight Bartan began to cease worrying about his safety. The intermittent sound of his jet was fading quickly in the pervasive stillness, and he had little to do but hold his course, now and then pumping the pneumatic reservoir which force-fed crystals to the engine. He might have been able to enjoy the sortie had it not been for Jop Trinchil’s parting words, and once again he found himself regretting that he had never been able to persuade Sondeweere to leave the Birthright group.
He had been only two years old at the time of the Migration and had no real memories of the event, but his father had told him much about it and had given him a good understanding of the historical background. When the ptertha plague had forced King Prad to build an evacuation fleet capable of flying to Overland from the sister world, Land, there had been strong opposition from the Church. The basic tenet of the Alternist religion had been that after death the soul flew to Overland, was reincarnated as a baby, lived out another life and returned to Land in the same way, part of an eternal and immutable process of exchange. The proposal to have a thousand ships physically undertake the voyage to Overland had been an affront to the Lord Prelate of the day, and the riots he led had threatened the whole enterprise, but the Migration had been accomplished despite adverse conditions.
When Overland was found to have no human inhabitants, no counterpart to Land’s civilisation, religious conviction had largely ceased to exist among the colonists. The fact that it had not disappeared entirely was, according to Bartan’s father, a triumph of stubborn irrationality. All right, we were mistaken, was the argument advanced by the remnants of the devout. But that was only because our minds were too puny to appreciate the grandeur of the plan devised by the Great Permanence. We know that after death the soul migrates to another world, and so inadequate was our vision that we presumed that other world to be Overland. We now realise that the departing soul’s actual destination is Farland. The High Path is much longer than we realised, brethren.
Farland was roughly twice as distant from the sun as the Land-Overland pair. It would be many centuries before ships from Overland would be able to undertake that kind of journey, Vlodern Drumme had concluded—passing his natural cynicism to his son—so the high priests had made a good choice. Their jobs were safe for a long time to come…
He had been wrong on that point, as it had transpired. In designing Overland’s infant society, King Chakkell—an old enemy of the Church—had made certain it contained no vestiges of a state religion. Satisfied with having abolished the clergy as a profession, the King had occupied himself with other matters, careless of the fact that his edicts had created a vacuum to be filled by a new kind of preacher, of whom Jop Trinchil was a good example.
Trinchil had embraced religion late in life. At the age of forty he had willingly taken part in the interworld migration, with no qualms about desecrating the High Path, and for the most part his life on Overland had been one of unremitting hard work on a smallholding in the Ro-Amass region. On nearing his sixties Trinchil had become disillusioned with the normal pattern of agricultural life and had decided to be a lay preacher. Unlettered, uncouth in word and manner, inclined to violence, he nevertheless had a raw force of personality which he was soon exerting over a small congregation, whose donations handsomely supplemented the rewards of his own physical toil.
Finally, he had conceived the idea of leading a flock of the faithful to a part of Overland where they could practise their religion without interference—especially from busybodies who might report Trinchil’s illegal activities to the prefect in Ro-Amass.
It was during the preparations for the Birthright Expedition that Trinchil’s and Bartan Drumme’s paths had intersected. Bartan had been earning a reasonable, if irregular, income by selling cheap jewelry of his own design and manufacture. Normally his commercial judgment was sound, but for a brief period he had allowed himself to become infatuated with the appearance of the newly discovered soft metals, gold and silver. As a result he had been left with a batch of trinkets he found almost impossible to sell in his normal markets, where there was a conservative preference for traditional materials such as glass, ceramics, soapstone and brakka. Refusing to be discouraged, he had started touring the rural areas around Ro-Amass in search of less discerning customers, and had met Sondeweere Trinchil.
Her yellow hair had bedazzled him more than gold had done, and within minutes he was hopelessly in love and dreaming of taking Sondeweere back to the city as his solewife. She had responded favourably to his overtures, obviously pleased by the prospect of marrying a man whose appearance and manner contrasted so sharply with those of the average young farmer. There had been, however, two major obstacles to Bartan’s plans. Sondeweere’s desire for novelty stopped short of any interest in changing her way of life—she was adamant that she would never live anywhere but on a farm. Bartan’s reaction had been to discover within himself a hitherto dormant passion for agriculture and an ambition to work his own plot of land, but the second problem had been far less amenable to a quick solution.
Jop Trinchil and he had taken an immediate dislike to each other. There had been no need for a conflict of interests, or even for a word to be spoken—the mutual antagonism had sprung into existence, deep-rooted and permanent, on the very instant of their first meeting. Trinchil had decided at once that Bartan would be an abject failure as husband and father; and Bartan had known, without having to be told, that Trinchil’s only interest in religion was as a means of lining his pocket.