A Web of Air Read online

  Ruan knew that by now the audience would have gathered in front of the apron-shaped stage which extended from the theatre’s stern. The first night in a new town always meant a big crowd. The seats would be full, and people would be sitting on the ground too, or standing at the back, or watching from the windows of nearby buildings. Max and Fergus would be going round with their cash-satchels, selling last-minute tickets. The closed curtains would look calm and classy, and give no hint of the panic boiling behind them, where Ambrose Persimmon would be trying out his big stage voice, “Me, me, me, me, me-me-mee!” while Alisoun Froy helped him into his first-act costume. Fern, Ruan’s small sister, would be sneezing in the fog of face powder that filled the ladies’ dressing room as she hared this way and that among the racks of hanging gowns on frantic errands for frantic actresses. Mistress Persimmon would have lost her tiara as usual and Lillibet would be sobbing that she had put on weight and couldn’t fasten the hooks and eyes on the back of her bodice … and all that effort, all that fuss and worry would be for nothing if Ruan didn’t make it back within the next two minutes!

  At the untidy sternward end of the market-deck was a stall called Squinter’s Old-Tech Improbabilities. Its owner, Mort Squinter, was haggling about something with a large man in a broad-brimmed hat and travel-stained blue cloak. Ruan waited a bit, bouncing from foot to foot with impatience, then interrupted. “If you please, Master Squinter, we need some copper wire.”

  “Ain’t you got none of your own?” asked Squinter, squinting down at him.

  “We did have, Master Squinter, but AP used it to make his costume more magnificent and he forgot to tell us and now there’s none left and a fuse has blown and we must do the show in darkness unless you can help us. Mistress Persimmon said you’d be sure to help…”

  (Mistress Persimmon had said nothing of the sort, but everyone on the Lyceum knew that Mort Squinter was in love with their leading actress; kept her portrait under his pillow and kissed it each night before he went to sleep. Ruan guessed that his request might go down better if it seemed to come from her.)

  “Well,” said the love-struck Squinter, blushing as he rummaged through the stacks of tiny wooden drawers behind his counter. “It’s not cheap, your actual copper, not nowadays when so much is shipping north to London. But of course if it’s for Laura Persimmon…” He looked to his other customer, hoping the man wouldn’t lose interest and wander off to try some other stall while he was busy with Ruan. “Beg pardon for the interruption, sir. This boy’s from Persimmon’s Lyceum, at the far end o’ the line. We travelled with ’em all last season. They have a wench from London who arranges their ’lectric lamps and stage-effects and such, and there’s never a performance goes by without this lad of hers comes scavenging for some piece of ’tech or other. It’s not as if Laura Persimmon ain’t radiant enough without old-fangled lights shining on her.”

  “She knows the secrets of electricity then, this Londoner?” the traveller asked. “What is her name?”

  Squinter, still nosing in those drawers, scratched his head and said, “She’s called Fever Biscuit. No, Fever Crumble…”

  “Fever Crumb,” said Ruan firmly, and the traveller turned and stared down at him with a look that was difficult to fathom.

  “Aha!” said Master Squinter triumphantly, holding up a scrap of cardboard around which a few inches of wire was wound. Ruan snatched it from him with a mumbled thank you and was gone, vanishing back into the crowd before Squinter could finish shouting, “What about payment?”

  “Ask AP after the show!” Ruan yelled over his shoulder. Squinter shouted something else, but by then Ruan was halfway down the gangplank, visible only as a ripple of disturbance moving away through the crowds. “’Scuse me – scoozey – scoozey-mwa…”

  The Lyceum’s stage-front reared up dark against a sky stitched all over with stars as bright as moth holes in an awning. The curtains billowed and filled in the soft breeze as if they were breathing. The crowd quieted, sensing that things were about to begin. They all knew the story of the play, for it was based on the old legend of the astro-knight Niall Strong-Arm, who flew to the moon in Apollo’s fiery chariot and won the love of the moon-goddess. What they were wondering was, how would the Persimmon company fit a fiery chariot and the moon’s white gardens on to that tiny speck of stage?

  Well, not at all, thought Ruan. Not unless he was quick. He flung himself up the steps at the backstage entrance and fell through the hatch into the bustle and commotion within. The air was thick with the smells of greasepaint and armpits, the tiny, stuffy corridors a maze of shadows and confusion, lit by bobbing lanterns. Alisoun Froy was kneeling at the shrine, saying a pre-show prayer to the goddess Rada, who was supposed to watch over all theatre people. As Ruan dodged past her, Mad King Elvis of America loomed out of the darkness ahead of him with his rhinestone armour all a-glitter and his vast black wig grazing the passage walls on either side. “Oh, this is just too beastly, darling!” he complained. “It’s a disaster! This would never have happened if we had stuck to using oil-lamps and reflectors! Why did AP ever agree to let the girl electrify us?”

  Ruan squeezed past him without answering. Cosmo Lightely always found something to panic about before curtain-up. He passed Dymphna and Lillibet too, who were complaining in whispers that their careers would be ruined, and then Fern, who was to play one of the ladies-in-waiting in Scene Two and was busy practising her single line – “Yes, my lady. Yes, my lady. Yes, my lady!” – in different voices with her toy dog Noodle Poodle for an audience. He scrambled down a companion ladder and ran aft past the wood-stacks and through the engine-room where the big boilers slept in silence and the batteries hummed. Then along a tight passageway and into the cramped burrow beneath the stage where Fever Crumb was waiting for him.

  And where Fever was, everything felt calm, even when it was a minute past curtain and not a footlight or a spotlight or a backstage glim lit anywhere in the Lyceum and you could hear the crowd outside starting to make that mumbling, sullen sound that comes off disappointed crowds and the heavy footsteps of Master Persimmon crossing and recrossing the stage above your head as he paced about waiting to begin his first soliloquy.

  Fever came to meet him, lighting the way with the pocket torch she’d made for herself. She took the wire and smiled a thank you at him. She was fairly new to smiling, having been brought up among Engineers who did not approve of it, and she wasn’t really very good at it; she kept her lips tightly closed and her mouth went down at one end and up at the other. Some people might not have recognized it as a smile at all, but Ruan knew what it meant. He stood there feeling proud and happy, holding the torch for her while she went to the open fuse-box, her clever fingers unwrapping the precise length of wire that she needed and twirling it round and round till it broke off the coil.

  She had already stripped out the blown fuse. She wrapped the wire round this terminal, then round that, making a bridge for the ’lectric particles to swarm across, while Ruan watched her. She was sixteen; tall and bony with a strange face that was all angles and large, watchful eyes that didn’t match; one green, one brown. Her hair, which she punished with a hard brush every morning and scraped back into the tightest of buns, was every shade of fair from white to honey, and her old grey linen shirt and canvas trousers were smeared with oil and grease and stained with sweat. In Ruan’s opinion (which no one ever asked for, him being only ten) there was no one in the world as lovely as Fever Crumb.

  She glanced at him with a little frown, as if she wondered why he was staring at her, then reached for the lever on the wall that turned the power on. Anyone else would have crossed their fingers for luck at that moment, or said a prayer to Rada, but not Fever Crumb. She knew that crossing her fingers couldn’t affect the universe, and she was always telling Ruan and his sister that there were no such things as gods or goddesses. But Ruan couldn’t help himself; he crossed as many fingers as he could, behind his back where Fever couldn’t see, and he said a pra
yer as well, not just to Rada but to the gods of far-off London too; Poskitt and Mad Isa and the Duke…

  The lever came down. The dim red working lights winked on. From outside came a noise like a big wave breaking, and Ruan realized that it was the sound of the audience applauding as the curtains suddenly flamed blood-red in the glare of Fever’s lights.

  Few people in Mayda had ever seen such lights as those before. The knowledge of electricity had survived from Ancient times before the Downsizing, but like all the old knowledge it was spread unevenly. Great cities such as London had buildings made of stone and salvage-plastic and lit at night by ’lectric lanterns, but on the wild Atlantic coasts of World’s End in those days you were more likely to find grass-roofed huts and tallow candles. In some of the settlements which Bargetown had visited that season people thought that its land-barges were magic, and were wary of approaching too close for fear of the demons they thought they heard a-growling and a-griping in their engine-rooms.

  The Maydans were not so primitive as that, but they had a distrust of technology and they mostly did without engines and devices. They had never seen anything like the clean, bright light that burst upon them as the Lyceum opened its curtains.

  The light grew brighter still, illuminating a stage dressed as a castle, with purple-headed mountains (painted by Ruan and Fergus Bucket) stretching off into a smokey distance. A wind was blowing (that was Max Froy standing in the wings, huffing into a conch shell and fanning dead leaves across the set). Clouds sailed across the painted sky, thanks to an invention of Fever’s own; a disc with cloud shapes cut in it spinning in front of one of her floodlights. Dappled by their shifting shadows, Niall Strong-Arm paced the battlements, a figure out of legend sprung to life, looking slightly older than most people had imagined him, but splendid nonetheless, with all those trails and squirlicues of melted-down copper wire gleaming on his armour and the gold visor on his helmet shining in the glow of the extraordinary lamps. Awed, the audience fell silent as he began his first speech.

  Fever and Ruan, crouched in the crawl space beneath him, had other surprises in store. Tall jars full of salt water surrounded them, each with an electric terminal in its base and another dangling into it on a wire. Electricity flowed from one terminal to the other through the water, completing a circuit which kept the lamps alight. But night was meant to be falling in the play, so while Cosmo Lightely entered and started to tell Sir Niall of his plan to conquer the Moon, Ruan pulled a cord which raised the dangling terminals higher and higher up inside the jars. With more water to flow through, the current grew weaker, partly spending itself as heat. The jars steamed. Up onstage the light grew dimmer and dimmer. Cosmo raised one rhinestone arm and told the astro-knight, “So go you, good Sir Niall, to the Moon / And tell its guardian goddess even she / Must to Good King Elvis bend her knee.” Then Fever flipped a switch that turned on a masked spotlight and threw a perfect crescent moon on to the sky above the cardboard parapets.

  Crouched between the simmering jars, she heard the audience’s sigh and knew that she’d astonished them again. That pleased her. Unlike Ruan, she’d never fallen for the magic of the theatre, and still thought that plays were so much silly nonsense. But she hoped that maybe there would be someone out there in that crowd who would be more moved by the brilliance of her lights than by the silly love story unfolding under them, and would look into electricity for themselves and come to see how simple it was, really, to generate and harness. Then she would have played a small part in restoring science and reason to this backward portion of the world.

  Or maybe that was just an excuse, a kindly lie she told herself to help her deal with the fact that Fever Crumb, trained in the ways of science and reason by London’s Order of Engineers, had spent two years travelling across Europa on a mobile theatre and helping its crew of actors stage their foolish shows.

  She switched on her torch to check her crumpled copy of the playscript, even though she knew the show by heart. There was a short scene front-of-curtain with Max Froy as the clown before Niall Strong-Arm climbed aboard the fiery chariot, when the red spotlight and the fire effect would be required. Time to fetch a cup of water from the pail in the corner. If the Maydans liked her moon then the fiery chariot should really please them…

  Yes, it was an unlikely job for an Engineer, but she liked to think that she did it rather well.

  3

  STRANGE ANGELS

  fter the show there was a party. There was always a party, after every show. When she first came aboard the Lyceum, a refugee from London with two newly orphaned children in her care, Fever had been shocked at the way the crew stayed up so late after each performance, drinking and laughing and telling again their well-worn stories of previous shows. But like so many irrational things, she had been forced to accept it. Something about the performances left the Persimmon company elated and filled with energy. If they had gone to bed they would not have slept. They needed to meet their audience, and be told how wonderful the play had been. They needed the praise and approval of strangers the way that ordinary people needed food.

  Fern and Ruan loved those gatherings. They liked to listen in on grown-up conversations which they only half understood, and play excitable games with their friends from other barges or the local children, new friends whose languages they might not even speak, and whose names they would forget tomorrow or next week when the theatre packed itself away again and Bargetown moved on. But Fever always stayed at the edge of the talk, a little apart, careful not to meet anyone’s eye in case they assumed that she was inviting them to praise her (which she found embarrassing) or just to talk to her (which was worse). She did not want to have to tell them that she came from London, and then go again through all the weary stories about the new Lord Mayor and his strange plans to set the city moving. She did not want to hear people tell her that she had the most remarkable eyes and bone structure, and to have to explain that her mother was a Scriven mutant.

  The worst thing about the parties were the young men, who would watch her across the crowd and then come sidling up to ask her if she wanted to dance with them, or go out for a walk, or a meal. She was getting tired of explaining that she was an Engineer and had no interest in their foolish mating rituals.

  That night she waited until the moon was well past its zenith before she called Ruan and Fern away and took them, complaining, to their bunks. All the way to the tiny cabin which they shared they kept telling her that they were not tired, no, not the least bit tired at all, and might they not stay up for just five minutes more? But they could barely fit the words into the spaces between their yawns, and their eyelids were already drooping while they brushed their teeth. Still protesting, they scrambled into their narrow bunks. Ruan curled up on his side, Fern snuggled down with Noodle Poodle, and within a few minutes they were both asleep, quite untroubled by the din of voices and a skreeling fiddle which Fever knew she could not hope to sleep through.

  She went softly out of the children’s cabin and slid the door shut. She felt no qualms about leaving them alone. They were theatre children, and the whole company was their family. If they woke and needed anything while she was gone they could go to Mistress Persimmon, or Lillibet, or Dymphna, or Alisoun Froy. Meanwhile, what Fever needed was fresh air, and silence.

  She went into her own cabin to fetch her coat; the white Engineer’s coat which Alisoun Froy, the Lyceum’s costumier, had made to replace the mud-stained, bloodstained, ripped and sodden red one Fever had been wearing two years before when she first came aboard. Then she climbed out of the barge and set off into the streets behind the harbour, climbing steadily up long stairs and steep, cobbled alleyways. It was never really very dark, not at this time of year, in these latitudes. The stars were out, but beyond the harbour mouth the western sky was cobalt and indigo, the sea a milky blue. Fever did not mind darkness anyway. She had better night vision than most people. To her, this was a good time for sightseeing.

  The city of Mayda was b
owl-shaped, built on the inside of a gigantic impact crater which rose from shallow water a few miles off the bleak coast of World’s End. Fever had had plenty of opportunity to look at the outside of it as the Lyceum and the other barges came down the coast road and crossed the causeway, but once they had passed through the fortified cleft in its eastern wall and entered the city itself she had been too busy preparing for the show to look around, and had only a confused impression of rows and rows of houses stretching up all around her towards the ragged crags that crowned the crater. Now, as she climbed alone through its steep streets, she kept stopping to look back at the fresh views of the city that revealed themselves at each level.

  From a few levels up she could see that the harbour which the barges had parked beside filled most of the crater floor. Fishing boats and pleasure yachts clustered thickly in the inner part, while big, ocean-going galleys and caravels were moored in a deep-water basin near the harbour mouth, which was a natural cleft in the crater’s western wall. The buildings that lined the harbourside were old and shabby and crammed close together; warehouses, chandlers’ stores, the pinched homes of the Maydan poor. Higher up the crater walls the buildings were bigger; spaced well apart in their steep gardens. Bridges spanned the goyles and gulleys of the cliffs, and some of these had houses built on them too, with baskets on long dangling ropes let down to haul up groceries and visitors from below. Highest of all, way up where those weathered crags stood dark against the stars and white birds veered on wide-spread wings, Fever could see the turreted mansions of the rich perching on Mayda’s heights.

  An interesting city, she decided. And strangely familiar, as if she had seen it in a dream. She wondered if Auric Godshawk had ever called here on his travels.